#001 Codify Flexible Work Practices
Now, more than perhaps ever before, has the need for flexible work been made abundantly clear¹.
Organisations across Australia have been quickly learning how to enable their teams to work from home, and how to transition face-to-face business activities such as training, events and services to online delivery.
In other words, a tonne of organisations that didn’t have flexible working arrangements are either quickly creating them, or struggling doubly at the moment.
And it’s incredibly easy to see why they’re important for people’s mental and physical wellbeing.
So, what is it?
Flexible work takes many different shapes, depending on individual and organisational needs.
Flexibility of hours, location and patterns of work can mean things like:
- Job share arrangements
- Part-time work
- Changes to work hours
- Changes to work days
- The ability to work from home, or remotely
- Flexible time off (e.g. purchased leave, unlimited leave or unpaid leave)
An organisation can choose to adopt one or many of these things for a number of reasons, including contributing to better work-life balance, increasing retention of staff, and boosting productivity and organisational resilience.
New Zealand financial firm Perpetual Guardian trialled a four-day working week on the condition that employees continued to meet their performance targets. The company reported that employees were happier and that productivity had increased by 20%.
Getting Started
If you’re an organisation that hasn’t adopted any flexible practices, here are some useful resources to help you codify and get creative with the idea:
- An overview on what the law is on flexible work (in Australia)
- Flexible work strategies and the companies that use them
- Creating a work culture that supports flexible work
- A template for a flexible work policy to be built upon
- A hands on guide with tools, on doing remote work well
Conversation Starters
And if you’re not quite at the stage of adopting flexible work, but are wanting to start a conversation within your organisation, here are some questions that might be helpful:
- What teams or functions of our organisation really require being in an office, versus being a nice to have, or just the default?
- What’s our current relationship with productivity and hours?
- What types of flexible work seem possible within our context?
- What changes to our processes and culture might a change create?
- How do we measure performance currently?
- Can this work for everyone, or just for a few?
- Who might flexible work benefit in our organisation? Who might it harm?
Going Further
For those who are already embracing flexible work within their organisations, perhaps you could begin to consider whether a definition of work hours is even necessary. Here’s a good article on moving beyond flexible work hours, by Management Matters, to get more ideas flowing.
Good Work is a collection of bite-sized ideas and resources for organisations wanting to make work, well, more good.
We’re on a mission to catalogue ideas that organisations can use to become more sustainable, healthy and impactful, for both their teams and wider communities.
¹ For later reference, we’re currently living through the COVID-19 pandemic, which is driving social-distancing amongst people and radically changing workplaces around the world.
