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Imagine you're an employer who is trying to stop flexible working - which may be hard to envisage. Here are your arguments...
Laziness
If you hate the idea of agile working then substitute the word 'flexible' for 'lazy'. Clocking off early to pick up the kids from school so you can log-on later, in fact, just means 'clocking off early'. Right?
Change
Not all change is good and, in fact, some change is bad. Changing teams and offices, schedules and phones systems to allow people to work from home, basically screws everything up. It upsets the people left in the office and means those poor souls not working flexibly end up doing all the work. Right?
If it ain't broke
You know, work is OK as it is. I'm used to the commute. I like my corner office and the filing cabinet in the corner. Sure, I've never actually looked at the management accounts from 2006 safely stored there, but one day I might. Why move me out into some awful, noisy shared working space just to keep some clever HR Director happy? This is what employers are thinking, right?
The future of working
These arguments aren't good enough. Our recent flexible working survey, which we undertook with recruitment experts Hydrogen, of over 400 employers was the latest piece of research to prove the point: the way we live and work in the future will be fundamentally different to the way we live and work now.
Does working flexibly mean working less? Sometimes. The civil service was the first big employer to embrace flexible working and got it completely wrong. But for many great employers - people like PwC, Deloitte or Sky - working flexibly just means working better. People are happier with a bit of flexibility, and happy people are also more productive.
The real business case
More importantly, it's what people want. Post credit-crisis, and in this online world of instant service, some flexibility isn't a nice-to-have it's a must-have. Life is about the journey, and the journey is lot better if you don't spend it commuting. Awful analogy, but you know what I mean.
If you don't give your employees the prospect of a bit of work-life balance then they will simply go off and find somewhere that does. 58% of working parents and carers would forego a pay rise for a bit more of that work-life stuff; now, that's the kind of stat that gets even the most antediluvian FD salivating!
In some ways, this is change that has already happened. You can work from anywhere at any time. The quid pro quo is that people might not be working when and where you would like them to be... It's time to get over it! Sure, face-time is good - necessary sometimes - but there are a million ways to build teams and relationships without bundling into the same shared office space every day. Trendy, flexible working space doesn't just save on the property costs, bizarrely, it also makes work easier as well.
Google should give it a go!
Ben Black
