Employer Flexible Working Fears
I want to discuss one aspect of our recent flexible working study: the fear many employers have that employee productivity falls if they work from home ‘unmonitored’ and ‘distracted’.
It’s a natural fear: I’m an employer and I occasionally share it, but I’m going to argue that it is misguided and disguises more fundamental and harder problems that we need to address.
The national study interviewed more than 1200 office-based businesses with less than 250 employees. It revealed a clear disconnection between employees and employers perceptions of flexible working: 80% of employees feel that they are, at least, as productive working from home as in the office. Furthermore, 33% of employees said they could do all or most of their job from home. However, the majority (55%) employers do not believe it helps productivity.
This weeks Economist highlights similar concerns relating to office productivity in a slightly different context: access to social networking sites from the office. The Economist discusses how employers were initially concerned that Excel would be a distraction as employees used it for creating lists for personal reasons. Nobo
dy today would contest that Excel is a valuable productivity tool.
But how many office employers have metrics for measuring productivity, let alone changes in productivity that occurs through innovation?
For example, at oneDrum, we’ve hired everyone through contacts or (social) networking. Not only does that save us the cost of a recruitment fee but I believe it assures higher quality employees through personal recommendations and shared interests.
My point is two-fold: Innovation increases productivity in ways we don’t normally consider; more generally how many employers actually have metrics around productivity. If you can measure that productivity has fallen because somebody has been working at home two days a week then fair enough. But I don’t know any that can.
This is the first aspect that employers concerns disguise: We are very poor at measuring employee productivity. This is a major problem and merits being solved in a first class way and not subordinated to a set of arbitrary constraints about how and where employees work.
In the UK, and across a lot of the Western world, we have put a lot off effort into equality legislation designed to encourage women back into the workforce (e.g. maternity leave). The goal of this legislation is to increase the talent pool. The effect of this for a business is to reduce the cost of talent.
One advantage of flexible working is an extension of this practice, encouraging people to work for you that otherwise would not and therefore reducing your staff costs, hence increasing the productivity of your business. Have you factored that into your productivity calculation?
If you are unable or unwilling to invest in measuring productivity, and you do not trust your (talented) staff to behave, then you’re likely to object to flexible working.
This is the second aspect that employers concerns disguise: You have an HR problem! Guess what genius, if they cannot be trusted to work at home then they cannot be trusted to work in the office and you shouldn’t have hired them. This neatly returns to my earlier point about the productive value of social networks: they ensure employees with shared values more akin to current employers and employees.
Employers cited another reason for their concerns about productivity: Ensuring access to people and documents from remote locations. I’m more sympathetic here, after all oneDrum was founded to address this specific problem. But although existing solutions are clunky, and come with greater cost and overhead than I believe they should do, there are plenty of decent options. You can find many of these listed at Web Worker Daily.
I’ve worked from home for the last three years, and sometimes I am distracted by the presence of my three-year old son, one-year old daughter and their mothers occasional squeals for assistance. But that misses the point: I was frequently distracted when I worked in an office by playing cricket in the cubicle, popping out to Starbucks, and worst of all, stupid and long, drawn out pointless meetings. Even that misses the point: the balance of benefits and costs for flexible working is multifaceted but you don’t know how to measure them and you simply fear the unknown unknown more than the known unknown.
2 years ago