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Flexible working – the people challenge
Monday 16th January was my Dad’s 70th birthday – if he found this depressing he made a good show of hiding it.
Unlike most people, it appears – as Monday was also ‘Blue Monday’ officially the most depressing day of the year.
Office Angels, the recruitment agency celebrated this not by sending my Dad a present, but by releasing some research among employees on the future of work describing a future in which more and more people believe they will be able to use technology to unchain themselves from their workplace and work from home or on the road.
This will have all sorts of benefits for employers – reducing property costs, improving productivity, reducing carbon footprint (indeed the Department for Transport launched a website to encourage firms to adopt flexible working practices to reduce the volume of travel) and helping to attract the best employees by offering flexibility, for example. And for employees, it will offer new levels of freedom and flexibility in how they organise their working day (or evening).
As Ben Dowd at O2 points out, in 2012 the London Olympics is set to not only provide a showcase for the latest mobile services, but also to make getting to the workplace difficult for many – encouraging businesses to try to crack flexible working. More broadly it is becoming clear, that flexible working is not just about lower property costs and happier workers but also about building new organisational models with resilience built into their reduced location dependency.
Yet, interestingly, press coverage focused on the more negative aspects, predicting ‘a less enjoyable future for workers where employees never meet their colleagues and employee engagement drops to an all-time low.
As HR Magazine points out: “This lack of integration may lead to a possible reduction in knowledge sharing between employees, according to 30% of those surveyed, while 43% of employers worry that it may lead to a lack of engagement and loyalty which may affect employee turnover. This concern does seem to have foundations, as almost half of employees (46%) felt that remote workers might experience a loss of identity with the organisation they work for, and a further third (31%) predicted low levels of engagement.”
What these fears demonstrate is that while there are significant benefits – to employers, employees and the environment of flexible working – to achieve real success organisations will need to take a holistic, joined up approach to developing new ways of not just using technology, but understanding how this will challenge their people and work with them to develop the behaviours and culture to excel in the new environment. As my colleague, Transform Associate Alex Wright, who specialises in the people aspects of this area, likes to say: the technology enables the change, but it’s people that deliver the benefits.
Written on my iPad on my Dad’s sofa.
