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Our Perspective
The Art of Managing: A Continuing Shift
The nature of the workforce and workplace has undergone profound and accelerating changes over the last 30 years. They include: greater diversity (and significant differences) in the workforce; a more decentralized workplace; the curse and blessing of pervasive technologies; and a strong shift in the values and standards that define what people expect at work. |
All of these changes and more have had a profound effect on managers and how they are expected to manage. Like the slow, irresistible movement of tectonic plates, the role of manager has shifted from commander to conciliator, from one who imposes uniformity to one who must build unity out of difference. There has been great pressure to accommodate these changes. |
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The Flexible Workplace: At the Intersection
No pressure has been more persistent over the last decade than employee demands for flexibility, and in particular for Flexible Work Arrangements. Staff need and want “greater control over where, when and how work gets done.” When employees first began demanding more flexible schedules, some companies offered benefit-like programs. But the true Flexible Work Arrangements that staffs had to have required more basic change and more customized back-and-forth than universal programs could provide.
In the end, truly flexible options and widespread informal flexibility require widely shared ground rules. They prosper with a universal system that enables staff and managers to collaborate on new and better ways of working. Companies can, and increasingly try to provide the platforms that support their people in enhancing the productivity of their work and balance in their personal lives. We provide guidance to our clients on how to build forward-looking workplaces that capture the full business potential of flexibility, provide best practice systems that support managers and employees (such as our FlexWise™ tools) and help managers become more respectful leaders. |
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Flexible Work Arrangements: Multi-Purpose Tools
Most large companies – and virtually all of our clients – have concluded that the best way to institutionalize flexibility throughout their organizations is to offer menus of Flexible Work Arrangements. We have led the industry for the last fifteen years in discouraging reason-based approaches to offering flexibility, and tying the standard for decision-making to a simple metric: impact on the business. Why someone wants to work from home need not matter. The more important question is, “If you are going to redesign the way you work to meet your needs, is there a way to do it that meets company and customer needs as well?”
With flexibility released from the “Why?” and focused on the “How?”, Flexible Work Arrangements become engines for driving change. Job shares pair people of highly valuable complementary skills in a single position; part-time positions create increased output at reduced cost; telecommuting increases focus and reduces carbon footprints; full-time remote work can eliminate reduce costs; flextime and compressed schedules call strengthen communication across time zones. A large mosaic of many tailored schedules across thousands of people can have a very positive impact on customers, employees and the bottom line. We believe that it is our role and talent to maximize such outcomes. Flexible Work Arrangements can be a powerful tool in turbulent times. |
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