How do I manage flexible working?

For some businesses it’s a thorn in their side, for others it’s a catalyst for innovation, and in 2020 it was a necessity for more or less everyone. So just how do you manage flexible working – and what are the benefits (and disadvantages)? 

Let’s ignore the last year for a moment – it was an extraordinary time during which the how and where of people’s working lives was largely taken out of the hands of most employers. We’ll return to 2020 later because it has valuable lessons to teach us, but for now let’s look at how life was before Covid arrived. 

In 2019, according to Statista, a nearly 8 million people in the UK were on part-time contracts, a little over 5.5 million worked mainly from home and some 4 million were working within some sort of flexi-time arrangement – from flexi hours to term-time working. 

Those numbers reflect the growing emphasis that was being placed on the need for businesses to offer – and achieve – a workplace culture that put work/life balance at the heart of their employee strategies. 

We’ve known for a long time that staff whose companies allow them to strike the right balance between the demands of work and the demands of home and family life are far more likely to be happy, loyal, and productive. 

Over that time, there has also been plenty of studies and papers to support that knowledge – search Google for ‘data for work life balance’ and you’ll find more resources than you can shake a stick at. 

The benefits to employers of flexible working are often tricky to measure in absolute terms in the sense that it’s difficult to draw a direct line between a team working flexibly and the business’s bottom line. But the benefits are there, nevertheless, for employers who care to look for them. 

One of the biggest drains on productivity (and therefore profitability) in UK business is seen through the lens of sickness absence. I’ve quoted this figure in previous blogs, but it’s worth restating it: 118 million sickness days were lost to UK business last year. 

That’s shocking enough, perhaps, but even more so when you then learn that this is the lowest figure since records began a quarter of a century ago. 

And it’s perhaps no surprise that this record was set during 2020 – a year when most of us were working from the kitchen table or a spare bedroom and were maybe happier for it.  

There’s much evidence to show that flexible working reduces sickness absence in the workplace and this in turn translates into positives when looking at your business’s bottom line. 

Other advantages of being open to flexible working include higher job satisfaction rates, improved employee good will, better emotional and mental health, more successful recruitment of higher quality candidates and improved staff retention. 

More flexible working may also mean a lower demand for office space, allowing your business to reduce its overheads. 

All in all, it pays to be open to the principles of flexible working and taking the time and effort to see exactly how flexible working arrangements that are aligned with your business objectives may help to drive performance. 

Yet there is also a balance to be struck. Some businesses operate more efficiently when people are working set times – shift-based work may be an example of this – and some roles require a member of staff to be available and in the workplace every day. 

It’s important to remember that there is no legal requirement for you to approve every request for flexible working that you might receive. 

But equally, taking a blanket approach to refusing those requests might not be in the best interests of you, your company, or your shareholders.

 What can we learn from the pandemic? 

The biggest lesson that many businesses learned was that it is possible to be successful when working remotely, and business leaders will do well to remember that as they plan a full return to work in the post-Covid world. 

Working remotely has been the bane of some people’s lives, and they will certainly welcome a return to work and the chance to socialise with colleagues in a much-needed change of scenery. 

But there are others who will have found the informality of home working suited them and who will want to retain all or some of that flexibility in the future. 

The simple fact is that managing flexible working need not be difficult, but it does require employers to be honest and objective about what structures are really needed to ensure their businesses are able to operate effectively and productively. 

If you’re thinking about how to manage flexible working within your business in the post-pandemic world, why not get in touch and see how Constantia Consulting can help you to develop and implement an effective strategy that aims to keep everyone happy?