Amazon has been much in the news for its sudden requirement to get everybody “back to the office” for five days per week. Actually, they are an outlier. Most organisations issuing edicts and mandates are for two-three days per week. In this post, we look at why that’s not a great idea either.
It’s tempting, yes? An employer wants to find a balance between people being together and working at a place of their choosing – it’s a way to solve the Proximity Puzzle.
Perhaps they have an instinct, a gut feeling, from their own experience of historic ways of working, that people ought to spend more time together.
Maybe they’ve seized on some research saying that on average, 2-3 days in the office is what organisations tend to end up with, so it must be OK.
Or ‘remote working’ is identified/scapegoated as a reason for poor performance
Or – and probably the worst reason – they want to fill up an empty building.
Whatever the reasoning, the outcome is a mandate: everyone should spend a certain number of days per week in the office. Or maybe even, specific days in the office.
So what’s the problem?
From a Smart Working perspective:
- Mandates erode the autonomy that employees greatly value, taking away choice at both team and individual levels – and the benefits that so much research identifies as flowing from control over one’s work schedule
- Mandates often compromise both work effectiveness and the employees’ work experience
- Tasks which may be better carried out elsewhere are constrained by being in the office, or by having to go there first before going out, e.g. to see customers
- The focus in work organisation fixates on time and presence, rather than results
- It reduces the potential for improved environmental performance by requiring unnecessary travelling
- It reduces the potential to reduce the physical footprint of work, and the potential for cost and environmental savings from doing so.
If in the end leaders remain committed to higher levels of control, and requirements for presence in the office are to be specified, it’s preferable to specify a percentage of time over a longer period. That gives a bit more scope and flexibility for individuals and teams to align the locations and times of work with the actual needs of the tasks they carry out, and allows a degree of autonomy.
Our recommendation, however, whatever the starting point, is to aim for the more dynamic forms of flexibility that characterise Smart Working Maturity.
The critical importance of autonomy
The ability to make choices over one’s work schedule – the time, the location, and in some cases the ‘how’ of one’s work – is very positively related to
- Health and wellbeing – reduction of stress and managing health issues in particular
- Improved work-life balance
- Improvements in engagement and motivation
- Improvements in loyalty and how the employing organisation is perceived
- Productivity – at least as self-reported productivity
- Saving money, e.g. by not commuting, or by choosing when and how to make journeys.
That’s at an individual level.
Direct business benefits are further realised at team level, when teams are allowed the autonomy to make mature and appropriate decisions about how, where and when work is best done, and have the freedom to innovate to improve working practices and processes.
A key part of this is making team agreements or charters, reviewing “what good looks like for us” and agreeing amongst team members how that autonomy will be exercised given the requirements and constraints of the work.
Location is only one of the factors involved – it shouldn’t be the starting point for how work is carried out, but arise from considering the needs of the work tasks involved in the context of the range of possibilities for working flexibly.
Employers who stamp down on the valued autonomy of individuals and teams, effectively pull the rug from under all the benefits I’ve highlighted. The business will suffer, and unless employees are showered with gold and plied with alternative benefits, they will either underperform – or they will walk.
If your orgasniation is struggling with balancing the benefits of both on-site and off-site work, and is looking for a more innovative and dynamic approach to flexibility, contact Andy Lake. andy.lake@flexibility.co.uk
