What Makes the Difference in Flexible Work Success but Only Half Receive?
Cali Williams Yost
Transforming work and organizations for more than two decades | High Performance Flexible Work Strategist & Futurist | Work+Life Fit Innovator | Thinkers 50 Radar | Author | Speaker
Dear Friends,
As our firm recently shared, flexibility is driving many of the business outcomes most important to leaders. And, at much higher rates than we found in our pre-pandemic data.?
While almost all employees have work life flexibility, only half (50%) reported receiving any training or guidance on how to manage their flexibility, according to our latest national employee research. We first uncovered this problem ten years ago and it remains a huge, missed opportunity for organizations to achieve priority performance objectives.
Our most recent data found training and guidance significantly increased the number of flexible employees who reported higher levels of:
Executing a high performing flexible work strategy is based on a system of change with training and guidance as the essential key to unlock performance, engagement and well-being.? With work ever changing, investing in training and guidance is critical going forward. Yet, half of flexible workers receive no support.
Many employees have been left alone to figure out how to be productive, communicate and coordinate working flexibly. It’s no surprise that following the pandemic’s crisis-driven change, there are gaps in the consistency and effectiveness of flexible work. Even before COVID, organizations faced a range of workplace challenges. Many still struggle with those same problems now.
We’ve found when clients invest in a thoughtfully developed flexible work strategy, including training and guidance, they uncover opportunities to resolve pre-pandemic issues. These organizations take the best of the way they worked before the pandemic, and during, to chart their flexible future. With training and guidance, they align leaders and employees behind a shared understanding of how, when and where work will happen best going forward.
What are the priority skills required to perform at high levels working flexibly? How does the organization benefit when everyone from the C-suite to individual contributors knows how to strategically leverage their flexibility to be their best?
Download “The Now and Next of Work: A 2023 Flex+Strategy Group Research Report , Unifying Leaders and Employees on the Future of High Performance Flexibility” for answers and other useful information.
SiriusXM Business Radio’s Wharton Business Daily Interview
Last week, I joined SiriusXM Business Radio’s Wharton Business Daily program hosted by Dan Loney to talk more about our research findings and what’s next for organizations and employees.
“We are basically all flexible workers now. It's not as if flexibility is going to go away. Flexibility delivers the business outcomes that are most important to leaders -- productivity, engagement, communication and innovation. And even more so post COVID. So really what we're talking about is how to optimize that. Instead of trying to go back to something, how do we go forward?”
We start by focusing on the work. Leaders and teams identify together what work happens best when together onsite and what work happens best when working independently elsewhere.
We start by embracing the opportunity to reimagine how, when and where we work so that both employees and organizations perform at their best. ? Listen to our conversation here .
Until next time, keep reimagining work and life,
Cali
Cali Williams Yost, Founder & CEO of the?Flex+Strategy Group , is one of the world's most trusted authorities on how work flexibility can unlock high performance, engagement, and well-being. For over 20 years, she has helped organizations from banks to hospitals to universities reimagine how, when, and where they operate. She is the author of?two books ?on the subject, and her media credits include the Today Show, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Marketplace, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Harvard Business Review.