2012 Workplace Trends Report: Flexible Workplaces
ABSTRACT: Flexibility in the workplace is the wave of the future. There are numerous proven benefits to this growing trend, including reducing a company's footprint (carbon and actual!), providing employees with more autonomy when deciding how to produce results, and more work-life balance. The prospect of allowing more flex-work and flextime can be daunting to many organizations. In that case, it is best to start at the top and form policy around flexible workplace arrangements and to reevaluate their effectiveness at periodic intervals - giving the flex strategies ample time to show their outcomes.
“Workplace flexibility helps businesses succeed and employees thrive by giving people an integral role in deciding how, when and where they do their best work,” said Henry G. (Hank) Jackson, Interim President, and Chief Executive Officer of Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). “That means higher productivity and employee engagement, lower turnover costs and more innovation - in short, a more competitive organization that is better prepared for what's next.”
As this trend continues to move mainstream, more emphasis will be placed on proving how to implement flexible workplace and workspace management strategies without adding additional capital expense. Topics of interest include space overflow management (comparing fixed vs. variable workspace availability), utilization of fixed vs. variable real estate, and smart meeting spend (leveraging outsourced videoconferencing to eliminate excessive travel and the need to purchase expensive video equipment).
BRIEF: Flexible Workplaces, Inspiring Design
By Jaime Leick
Guest Contributor from Life Meets Work
Workplace Flexibility - Not An Employee Benefit Anymore
"Work-life balance" has long been part of corporate vernacular in America's Fortune 500 companies. It encompasses a variety of family-friendly benefits like backup childcare, on-site fitness centers, concierge services and-often, but not always-flexible work arrangements.
The recent recession had an impact on the workplace flexibility movement. Employers were cutting staff, asking everyone to do more with less, and one of the last things on many workers' minds was asking for any kind of scheduling accommodations.
Now the tides are turning and workplace flexibility is enjoying a sudden new emergence in corporate America. Working Mother magazine put it on the cover of its October 2011 issue and the Society for Human Resources Management launched a comprehensive public policy campaign to promote workplace flexibility in the spring of this year. These are powerful endorsements.
However, what is it exactly that has workplace flexibility at the top of corporate agendas again? Just pick your social, economic, environmental or health issue and it points back to flex.
In December 2010, the President signed the Telework Enhancement Act, which set minimum standards for teleworking among Federal employees. The move is expected to improve productivity and retention, and help the government remain operational during extreme weather and crisis situations. (The “snowmageddon” of 2010 and the estimated $70 million per day in lost government productivity did much to help the matter along.) Last year's H1N1 virus is furthering support for telecommuting. Encouraging workers to stay at home when they are sick (and keep their sick children home, too) is a lot easier when they can login and stay productive from home.
Many groups are using the same issue to push paid sick leave. The Family Values at Work organization used the recent blockbuster Contagion as a launching pad for a compelling video on the public health issues associated with paid time off. Not flexibility exactly, but in the same purview.
Then there is a whole other group of researchers pointing to societal changes and a socioeconomic imperative for flexible work. The dual-parent/one-income family model of the 50s and 60s has virtually disappeared in our country. It is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to sustain rigid mandatory overtime and just-in-time scheduling policies. Given the choice between leaving a three-year-old unsupervised and risking a job, parents will choose the three-year-old.
We are seeing a dawning realization among hourly wage companies that ongoing problems with absenteeism and callouts may be more a reflection of unrealistic staffing policies, not an irresponsible workforce. Speaking of changing family dynamics, the 2009 landmark report from Maria Shriver, “A Women's Nation,” revealed that for the first time in our nation's history, more than 50 percent of the workforce comprised women. Then the percentage of women in the workforce and women who were their family's primary breadwinner increased in 2009 and 2010 as recessionary layoffs hit men disproportionately harder. Now women are outpacing men in educational attainment, too. These shifts are only going to increase the need for flexible work as women continue to balance care giving responsibilities and careers.
Meanwhile, men are spending more time in hands-on parenting and are reporting levels of work/life conflict that exceed their female counterparts. Several pieces of new 2011 research suggests that men are just now going through the “having it all” conflicts that became part of the collective female identity as early as the 1970s. Therefore, we are seeing a stronger demand for flexibility from our male population, too.
On the topic of care giving responsibilities, our aging population is going to place increasing demands on the sandwich generation workforce. Flex is an issue for adult caregivers and it is an issue for healthy boomers who would like phased retirement options.
Back to the topic of telecommuting. our transportation infrastructure is not keeping pace with commuting demands. Large cities, states and municipalities across the country are providing financial incentives for companies to implement telecommuting and flexible scheduling as part of their alternative commuter strategies. By the same token, telework is also being seen as an emissions reductions strategy, something that may play a bottom-line role in emissions trading.
Finally, technology means that telecommuting and virtual teams has really become part of the American business world already-flexible work policies or not. Office professionals are already logging in at night and on weekends. It is just a matter of time before more companies realize that expecting home-based weekend work without allowing some home-based weekday work just is not going to fly anymore.
Because recession or not, the U.S. still has a skilled worker shortage. As the economy picks up and the boomers finally do retire, it is only going to get a whole lot worse. Companies that get ahead and build real cultures of workplace flexibility are going to have the staffing advantage and the competitive edge.
Flex is no longer an “employee benefit.” Those days are gone. Today it is an all-around public policy issue and bottom-line corporate strategy.
