A recent study by Microsoft on attitudes to flexible work, carried out by Vanson Bourne, shows that small businesses are better at meeting employees’ demands to have greater flexibility in deciding when and where to work.
The study featured 1,500 workers across 15 European countries, who were asked about their attitudes towards flexible working. It emerged that small businesses better meet employees’ demands for greater work flexibility.
Even though the majority of office workers want to work more flexibly, the larger the organisation, the less likely its employees are able to do so. Half of the interviewees said they lacked access to the most basic technology tools that would enable them to work away from the office.
By not enabling the flexibility that employees demand, larger and medium-sized businesses are missing out on the opportunity to increase productivity and attract and retain great talent.
While about a quarter of employees in small businesses (with fewer than 50 staff members) regularly work away from the office, only nine per cent from organisations with 500 or more employees do so.
Small organisations are the most likely to allow flexible working, with more than two-thirds doing so; one-third have a policy and technology support in place. Eighty per cent of respondents who work for a large organisation do their overtime at the office, compared with 61 per cent of those who work for small businesses.
A quarter of employees in large organisations cannot access technology and systems away from the office, while only 16 per cent in small businesses face that problem.
The study also shows that the impact of flexible working goes far beyond employee satisfaction. Fifty-six per cent of flexible workers believe they work more productively away from the office, and 48 per cent say this is because they can fit their work around personal commitments.
Seventy-three per cent of workers in Europe think their lives would improve if they could work more flexibly, but fewer than a third of businesses provide guidelines on flexible work. Four in 10 employees said the option of flexible work would influence their decision to accept a new job.
By enabling employees to work flexibly, businesses face two challenges: ensuring people have access to the right kind of technology with IT support, and creating a culture that trusts staff to be productive even when away from the office. Perhaps this is where larger organisations are challenged.
“Successful organisations are those that break down the barriers between people, workplace and technology and establish a culture of trust,” said Klaus Holse Andersen, vice-president of Western Europe for Microsoft.
“This means empowering people by providing them with a workplace that facilitates flexibility, self-direction and engagement and enabling them with the technology and tools that help them to be productive wherever they are. To bring the vision of a new world of work to life, leadership teams need to establish a culture that is focused on what individuals achieve, rather than how long they spend in the office.”
According to a recent White Paper from Microsoft UK’s Hybrid Organisation, barriers to new ways of working often occur in the middle layers of business.
“Often they are the managers who don’t like the idea of having their office taken away from them, and they manage by control instead of by results,” said Peter de Winter, programme director for Workplace Innovation, Philips, a programme introduced five years ago to encourage its people to be more entrepreneurial and innovative.
“Most employees and managers, however, love to work according to the new ways of working once they are used to the concept.”
Technology plays a vital role in realising the potential of working flexibly, and the IT department holds one of the keys to success – providing the right off-premises support.
However, 19 per cent of employees find their already overstretched IT team “very helpful” in providing technology support for flexible working. In addition, more than half of all workers say they don’t have access to a company laptop or mobile e-mail device, which means they are lacking the basic tools.
This could also be a reason why 43 per cent of all office workers and one-third of those working for a large enterprise use either a personal laptop or mobile device for e-mail access. And it may explain why 68 per cent of employees who work overtime each week do so from the office.
Even though technology is widely available today to enable flexible working – be it mobile devices or cloud services granting access to software and company resources from virtually everywhere – its natural use in European businesses is still not standard.