How Flexible Is Your Working Life?

Unless you work for yourself as a freelancer or business owner, the chances are that you work flexibly a lot less often than you would like. There remains a stigma attached to remote working that prevents many businesses from developing a fully flexible workforce that would improve employees work-life balance,  increase productivity and, if managed properly reduce facilities and infrastructure costs for organisations.

So why aren't companies rushing to reap the benefits of flexible working?

For some there remains the underlying belief that workers outside the office won't be working as hard as they would if they were being overseen by their supervisors. Despite endless amounts of evidence to the contrary. Others view the loss of interaction between team members as a insurmountable obstacle - yet this too has been shown to be something that can be easily managed. I can't imagine there are many businesses who wouldn't want the positive effect to their bottom line, but how many have actually quantified what the cost of providing a desk to a worker really is?

The reality is that by the time you've included heating, lighting, power and floor space costs, a desk in an office is an expensive commodity. Especially when a home worker is subsidising those costs in return for some flexibility.

Then there are the potential benefits in dealing with the extremes of weather which inevitably disrupt the day to day business in the winter. How much better would your performance have been over the last few months if you'd had the option to login from home and avoid the commuter chaos that has disrupted large parts of the Northern  hemisphere?

Whilst some scenarios larger companies are able to derive substantial savings from a well-planned flexible working policy for smaller businesses there are much smaller savings to be made. When tied to improved productivity though these benefits should not to be ignored.

Moving workers out of expensive office space and into their own homes - even if it's just for one day a week - is such an easy win it's hard to understand why businesses haven't been rushing to mobilise their workforces.

Maybe it's just a matter of time.