You can’t see your staff. Their screens are off, the kitchen is empty, meeting rooms deserted.

Yet they’re making you more money than if they were feverishly slaving over their desks.

How can this be true, and how can you make sure you’re relaxed and confident your team fit this bill, rather than a paranoid boss overseeing work-shy absentees?

More and more British workers are part of a flexible workforce, taking advantage of IT developments that allow them to work whenever and wherever they want or need to. There’s huge potential for happier and more profitable employees, but this requires adjustments to traditional management approaches. It’s evolution, not revolution, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening to adapt to.

Take me as the example. I travel a lot for work, yet my family are Stateside. Being able to access any network, anytime means I can juggle these commitments. But that isn’t some sort of perk for being the boss! Across BT staff work flexibly, and were doing so years before many companies. Recently termed ‘third generation flexible working’, it’s about a virtual office experience, independent of location, which gives employees far greater independence to plan their work. Seven out of ten BT staff now work from home on a regular basis, with 11,600 full time home workers.

Still doubting? The numbers should convince even the most sceptical. A 20% increase in productivity for home workers, and over £700m saved since 2000. Because flexible working is better working, people are happier. Our recent research showed 54% of managers identified flexible workers as having a better quality of life, whilst one in three employees would forego a pay rise in preference for the ability to work flexibly.

So, you want to give it a go, but you’re not quite sure how to take the next steps to make flexible working a success for your business?

Let’s tackle the technology first. The basics involve supplying staff with laptops and smartphones, and ensuring your systems enable them access anything they could from their desk. http://www.mobility-costs.co.uk/ has more information on what might work for your business.

Many, however, find managing these workers more difficult than equipping them. A recent roundtable I participated in highlighted the following issues afflicting managers:

  • a lack of trust in their remote workers’ commitment to the work.
  • a need to control through face to face command. 
  • measurement of worker performance by ‘time at the desk’ not the results achieved. 
  • a conviction that management is concerned with managing people not with managing results.
  • a lack of communication and inter-personal skills 
  • resistance to change

There is no single solution to these issues; the key is for managers to be aware of these challenges, and to fundamentally tailor their approach. Instead of controlling employees’ work, managers become facilitators and coaches, setting clear deadlines and frameworks, and agreeing outputs such as completed work, not inputs such as desk time.

The key question for managers to ask themselves is simple - Do I need to see my workers, to be sure they’re working? The answer is clear, just like the continued (and irreversible) trend toward a flexible workforce.


Bill Murphy is the managing director of BT Business
http://www.insight.bt.com/