Beyond Flexibility: How To Avoid Chaining Your Team To A Desk 9-To-5
A recent report by Zenefits found that 77% of U.S. small business employees cite flexible working as a major consideration in a new role. With this insight, flexibility moves from being a perk to a requirement for most organizations. However, the same study shows only 67% of organizations have flexible working, and that 21% of surveyed employees were considering leaving because the flexible working on offer wasn’t fit for purpose. There is a massive delta between expectation and reality for those requiring flexibility in their working schedule.
What is your organization doing to keep up with demand?
What is flexible working?
It’s a term used to cover a vast array of approaches, and its meaning varies between organizations. It mainly refers to any level of flexibility in working hours, from the ability to start half an hour later to miss rush hour, all the way to working from an exotic location at times that suit you.
At Beyond, we prefer to use the term “agile working,” which we define as a working approach that focuses less on constraints that, when too rigid, hamper collaboration, and more on encouraging team flexibility and freedom. This allows for greater concentration on output, business needs and employee comfort. This definition helps team members self-manage their schedules, particularly when combined with four guiding principles:
• Prioritize your client over your location.
• Comply with security requirements.
• Look ahead: Plan where you can.
• Be available.
Agility In A Client-First Organization
In organizations where your client dictates the work and the relationship is key, it can seem daunting at first to move to a more agile approach to working hours. This can be due to smaller teams that hold the relationships with the clients, or due to traditional agency methods of tracking project work using time sheets and billing time and materials over value, which naturally encourages a level of rigor for managing timekeeping that seems increasingly out of sync with the way employees want to operate.
Client-first organizations are very much dependent on the satisfaction of the client for their own success. For this reason, the entire structure is built around the comfort and satisfaction of that client. The higher percentage of the business that is in contact with the clients, the larger the ratio of their influence on that organization.
On the flip side, organizations that limit the client-facing aspect to a smaller number of employees, or do not have specific project work being delivered per client, show real progression and flexibility in their approach to working. Those interested can learn from companies such as Basecamp, with a fully remote team. The company operates with what is called a distributed remote model.
Singular product organizations are another great example of this, as the majority of the development and innovation is done on the product internally, with externally facing people selling it to the world. This means the innovation and productivity of the teams take precedent. If we then look at the Zenefits report, we can see 78% of employees believe that flexible working makes them more productive. The business case feels like it writes itself for other organizations to take note and work through their issues with a more agile approach to work schedules.
The Business Case
Flexible working is here to stay. Gen X may have led the way in tentatively requesting this for their work-life balance, but Gens Y and Z have hammered the need home, making it a requirement in their working lives. The mantra “make work, work for you” is not just a pithy phrase we use at Beyond, it is a summation of how the future generations will expect to interact with their employers.
A more flexible approach to employees also encourages greater diversity in your teams. Semi-retired professionals are looking for partial roles to fit around their commitments, and have high expectations. Being able to offer these means you are able to attract exceptional experience. It’s better to have excellent talent for some time than not at all, and those starting to make the changes now will reap the reward of excellent diverse and untapped talent pools.
Approaches To Agile Working
To help you identify what may work for your organization, here are some of the different approaches:
• Physical location: On a macro level, this covers the location of your teams, from home working one day a week to fully remote working from Australia. On the micro level, it refers to how you lay out your seating in your building. Do you need desks for everyone or is hot-desking an option? Many organizations are saving on expensive facilities costs by reducing the number of allocated desks.
• Working hours: With globalization impacting what used to be the 9-to-5 work day, it is a natural evolution for working hours to shift to accommodate. Some organizations manage this with agreements to core hours such as 10-to-4, and flexibility around those. Others allow employees to dictate their working hours, provided they prioritize clients and communicate clearly their whereabouts.
• Job design: As career paths become less linear, employees are looking for a more flexible approach to job design. We refer to this as squiggly career paths and encourage our team members to amass skills and focus on self-guided development to help them transition into new roles.
Prescribed Innovation
The world of work is changing, and so are the needs of employees. Organizations’ ability to adapt to the changing market conditions will be the difference between their success and others’ failures. An environment that fosters innovation is key to this, and innovation cannot be prescribed between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Take a leaf out of some of the more progressive organizations’ books, and don’t be left behind.
Originally published at www.forbes.com on February 25, 2019.
