Flexibility enhances work environments.
Without flexibility, you can become trapped.
Neither you nor your employees need to feel trapped in a dull, cramped office and a daily commute. Create more flexibility in your working environment while inspiring everyone to improve productivity and the bottom line. Employees today want to become more mobile with flexible working hours.
Technological advancements allow you to connect with your customers, employees, and others anywhere. You can operate your business remotely with less overhead costs while improving your work/life balance.
Rapidly growing businesses are always concerned with their flexibility and adaptability. Smaller businesses have far fewer embedded systems and processes that constrain flexibility, impede fast decision-making or slow execution. This creates tight, rapid feedback loops, resulting in a better alignment of decision-making and flexibility with value creation.
The potential benefits of work flexibility include increased morale, motivation, and the ability to attract and retain talent. Unfortunately, some managers don’t know where to start. Others fear that performance could suffer or something important could fall through the cracks. Some are like broody hens; they like all their chickens around them.
Most have concerns about having employees work outside regular work hours or at places other than the office. By taking a job design approach to workplace flexibility and mobility, you can reap the benefits of offering a better arrangement while minimising the downside.
A few things you might like to consider to improve flexibility.
- Outsource all but your core activities. Run your business remotely with people who already have experience and can carry out your activities. This will give you more flexibility to work on important business tasks.
- Sell more things online. Online services allow you to move towards a ‘paperless’ career. If you sell products without manufacturing, you and your team can work from anywhere. Even your physical products and logistics can be outsourced.
- Think differently about productivity. Fixed working hours are a thing of the past. Model full-time and part-time employees’ working hours to suit their circumstances. Base their salaries directly on their performance. You will find that, in most cases, flexibility will improve performance.
- Work where you are comfortable. Whether in a busy cafe, a park, or on a skiing holiday, you can work where you perform well and feel comfortable. Mobility is a feature of modern business.
- Don’t stop learning. When venturing into remote workplaces, you must adapt to your new surroundings. Don’t be afraid to use digital communication tools and teach yourself how to improve your situation and business.
- Improved planning practices. When a business starts on the journey of serious planning, flexibility is heightened, the struggles subside, and positive things happen.
- Real-time marketing. Every business has high and low periods of activity. Participating in real-time activities can be more effective when coupled with responsive flexibility. This means working when the work is to be done and enjoying life when things are slow.
Quotable quotes
“Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future”. Siri Hustvedt
“To make flexibility work, it is not only necessary to change our attitude about who is a good worker and who is not. We have to train to recognise the difference between the number of hours worked and the quality of work produced”. Madeleine Kunin