Many employers have a certain anxiety when it comes to the idea of flexible working. They want to ensure that they can have more control over what employees are doing in an environment that they can customize completely. However, this might often have a negative impact on the workspace and lead to the very drop in productivity that you’re looking to avoid.
Your business is individual, though, and that means that you can offer a flexible working option for your staff that actively complements the results that you’re looking to achieve. To get started, you just have to know what those aims are.
Dotting Is and Crossing Ts
The benefits of flexible working, for either you or your employees, won’t be properly felt if it isn’t a move that’s implemented properly. You don’t want it to be a shift that compromises your security or the flow of your work, and that means that you’ve got to do some thorough research that can set the stage. Doing some digging into remote network access can help to inform you and your team how to utilize an intranet system without creating fresh vulnerabilities, for instance, allowing remote working to feel just as secure as the office
It’s also important, from a more day-to-day perspective, that you have the proper tools in place, whether these be collaborative tools like OneDrive or Google Docs, or meeting tools like Zoom.
Understanding Your Employees
When you’re trying to improve the productivity of your workplace, it’s easy to speak in generalizations. You might think that all employees work better one way or another, but ignoring such individual differences might lead to you not quite getting the results that you were looking for.
Flexible working as a term is valuable here because it’s much less rigid than simply referring to one style of work or another. For example, it allows people to have some control over how much they work remotely and how much they work in the office, meaning that people can lean into whichever environment they feel as though allows their best work. It can also allow them control over the times that they work, meaning that in order to reach the higher levels of productivity, you might have to trust your staff members with this degree of customization over their working hours.
The Unique Rhythm Compared to Office Work
Assuming that you can just carry on with the same mentality and approach that you would in a full-time office environment might also be a move that stifles the potential of flexible working. Micromanaging in any environment is something that can decrease employee happiness and restrict their autonomy, but in a remote environment, it might just strip the results back altogether until they might as well be in the office anyway. This could even be a problem that increases your staff turnover, at which point the whole venture has completely backfired. Understanding what can be beneficial about this mode of working might mean getting to grips with the idea of relinquishing control in certain contexts.
