Barriers to creating a flexible working culture

Times have definitely changed 

We used to think about flexible working as helping team members manage regular caring responsibilities or to give better work life balance.  Now, due to COVID-19, we’ve all had to adjust our ways of working. Businesses are starting to see the benefits from a people and a financial perspective. However, despite all of this some organisations still struggle to make it work. We’ve worked out why:

1.    No business case

There are always one or two (often senior people) who prefer to have people in the office.  It’s critical that you help them understand why flexible working is important and the impact it has on the bottom line.  Perhaps you’d like to reduce office overheads, fill hard to recruit critical roles or better meet your customer’s needs? Whatever it is, you must be clear about the rationale so everyone is onboard.

2.    Out of date technology 

We’ve all been in roles where working from home is practically an extra day off! Either you can’t access all your files, join meetings remotely or deal with unexpected issues because your remote set up doesn’t match the office infrastructure. By ensuring you have the right technology in place, remote working is just a normal day in the office (and can potentially be more productive than being in the office).

3.    The wrong performance measures

Flexible working often makes it difficult to be specific about how, where and when work is completed.  Moving to outcome based performance measures will remove this problem.  For example, setting an objective to increase customer satisfaction by 10% means you can allow your employees to determine how and when this objective is achieved around their working arrangements (which may not always be between 9-5.30).

4.    Lack of trust

Not being able to see what your team members are doing on a daily basis can cause panic in even the most experienced managers. If you have a true business case, and the technology, to support flexible working - alongside the correct performance measures - it’s critical you trust your teams to do the right thing (until they give you a good reason not to).

5.    Having an office

Some of the most successful flexible working practices are in businesses that don’t have a traditional head office set up. An office with assigned desk space and meeting rooms will create an implicit expectation that employees need to structure their working week around being present there. But do they actually need to be? This set up prevents businesses and employees from looking for more effective ways of working.

Have you been struggling to establish a flexible working culture? Or perhaps your culture isn’t working how you would like it to. Get in touch, we’d love to talk to you about how to get more out of your people, call: 0333 0433239 or email: info@pmp-hr.co.uk

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