E003: Agile Working

This is the world of work podcast with James and Jane. Hi

everyone. Just before we get cracking into this week's episode, I wanted to jump on and mention our new support page. So as some of you may know, we're on a bit of a mission to increase accessibility to good quality management and career training. And if you'd like to support us in this, you can go to www dot, World of work.io. Forward, slash support to learn more.

Everyone. This is James, and this is Jane, and welcome back to another the world of work podcast, the WoW podcast. We're coming up to episode three. Pretty exciting. You can check us out on our website, www dot the wowpodcast.org, if you want to get in touch, send us an email. JJ at the WoW podcast.org, or you can tweet at the WoW podcast. How you getting on? Jen, I'm good. How are you this week? Yeah, I'm pretty good. Life is pretty good. It's,

yeah, I'm busy working on a bunch of different projects, but generally having a good time. Of course, doing a bit of research for this. Yeah, I think, Well, it's interesting this week's topic, isn't it, because both of us have this option. Yes, in fact, we are currently sitting in my living room, yes, only one room away from the puppy that I can have because of

the way that I design my life. Yeah. So why don't you introduce this week's topic? Yeah? Okay, so this week, we are going to be speaking about flexible or agile working. I guess it depends where you are. And the UK, the phrase agile working is fairly common in other places, people maybe speak about flexible working flexible working arrangement, stuff like that. So that's the topic for today. As ever, we're going to have a bit of a definition discussion, and we'll do a bit of a research round up. We'll bring out another list of a week. We'll tell you some stories from the coalface or keyboard. Share a few final thoughts, top tips in relation to subject, and then check out and let you guys get on with your lives. Okay, but before we move on to that lives stuff, it's probably a really good

starting point for flexible working, given the confusions around definitions and terminology and all of that, because, let's face it, it means a million different things to a million different things to a million different people. Definitions are probably the best place to start. Definitely, a lot of confusion out there. So one of the things that we want to talk about is the difference between

agile working as we mean it in this sense. And unbelievably, I was surprised to see our friend, the NHS. NHS is up there again. Back in our definitions, they got a lot of people right, and

they're what is the biggest employer in the world. Is that right?

I think, I think China have been Walmart right up there. But certainly, certainly they're one of the biggest employers. So it's, it's always a good idea to look at them, and I think we need to talk about flexible working, agile working, and what we mean it,

what we mean by that. So there's a few different definitions. I'm I'm going to give this one. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it's from, it's from the ft.com probably the bastion of non flexible working environments, not not the not the the Financial Times, but the kind of industry that they work within, given stock markets, etc. Flexible working gives employees flexibility on how long, where and when they work. Employees access flexible working through human resource policies, which usually requires supervised re approval. Boring, isn't it? Sorry, what was that? I barely even took it in. Also, I don't really understand the last part of that. Important part of it is that when we talk about flexible working in the UK, we quite often are talking about employee centered policies, so policies that have been created in order to give employees more flexibility in the way they work, and that's an important distinction coming up in a minute. So one of the other definitions that we sourced was from study.com

a flexible working relationship. And this is not a definition, isn't so much as an essay, but a flexible working relationship is one that doesn't have the normal constraints of traditional job. Lord knows what normal is anymore, but for example, so hopefully, they've given us one. Employees who offer flexible working relationships may allow employees to come into work earlier than normal and leave later than normal, or an employee may long work longer days

with less number of days, so condensed hours, they may be allowed to work from home rather than from an office. They may be able to take a leave of absence to share certain or share certain aspects of work or pay with other employees. And I think, I think the important thing to note there is flexible working suggests that there is a norm. And.

That people are offered the opportunity to move away from that, whereas our friends at the NHS talk much more about agile working, which is much more business or organization centered. So agile working is a way of working in which an organization empowers its people, its workforce, to work, where, when and how they choose with maximum flexibility and minimum constraints to optimize their performance and deliver best in class value and customer service. It uses communications and information technology to enable people to work in ways which best suit their needs without the traditional limitation of where and when tasks must be performed. It said pretty early on, there's a piece around benefit for your organization, isn't it? I can't remember exactly, remember exactly what you said right at the beginning. So right up the way, it's a way of working, which, in an organization empowers. So it's the organization acting, and they talk about optimized performance and deliver best in class. Yeah. So it's sort of delivery based, to some extent, outcome driven, for an organization, as well as employee benefit. And almost that is the central point. The flexibility is a nice thing to have. But the point is that it's about creating an organization that delivers best so that they're probably, it's the clearest example where they are relating directly the opportunity to flexibly work as a direct benefit to the organization, rather than the employee. And I think that's a shift that we've seen recently.

And I think it's also my cynical hat, where they talk about best in class, value and customer service. My cynical hat says it was also can be effective, very attractive to organizations, because they see it as a cost effective solution. Yeah, and we can't move away from that. We do have to have that aware.

I think the piece that you found from the Agile Future Forum, I think is really important, because I think it helps us start to define, define, excuse me, start to define

what Agile working practices can look like. And they talk about four dimensions. They talk about time, location, role and source. Yeah, so time, when do people work? And that might be about the hours they work. So part time working, stage retirement, it might be about

the condensed hours, or it might be about physically timing. So do they work on in the evenings? Of freedom? Do they have the freedom to work when they choose

location. Where do they work? So they're working across multiple sites. They're working in one site to their hubs that they work. Do they work from home? Do they have are they allowed to pick their own office space? Because to me, one of the things I would say about agile working is truly agile working gives people the opportunity to work where they work best, and that might be an office down the road from them that doesn't connect to the organization, but still gives them a community. Yeah, that, interestingly, doesn't seem to be an option in so many places because of the cost impact. So time, location, role, so what they do,

which I think you're gonna come on to a little bit more, but I think is really important, and also source. So who is employed? So are they using contractors or temps again, there's an interesting cost implication there, but I think they're the people that you have to look at and say they have the clearest understanding of all the different types of working arrangement that come together to form agile working so they're my favorite, James, thanks for finding that one.

So I don't know if that leads us on to a place where you might want to share a little bit more about what, yeah, I can do. I can do. Just before I do that, though I was going to maybe say one thing that we're absolutely not talking about, which is agile project management. If anyone's dialed in or dialed in, that's my work. Speak here. Wow. Anyone dialed into this conference call? If anyone is listening in the hope of learning about agile project management your own for wrong place, I'm afraid, and that's mostly because neither of us know enough about it to do a full podcast, but also because maybe we'll talk about project management tools later, but right now, we're very much focused on what impacts someone's working environment. Yeah, so as we've seen, though, this is all about how people work. What's the relationship between employee and organization around the ways that employers work and use their energies to create outputs. That's really what we're getting at with

our flexible, agile working here. So as ever, I'm going to do a bit of a research round up for you and tell you a little bit about what I've learned about I feel like we should have a Music Research Roundup. We could do the did it? Did it do and then I think Captain might have, might have that training.

Okay, so research Roundup, then, so I've got a couple bits, but I'm going to run through you through, for you guys, this time, a little bit of a flying tour, of a history, then a little bit of a discussion around what some of the core components are around flexible or agile working, and then a little bit of a reflection on some of the benefits and risks for employers and employees in relation to Agile or flexible working. So first off, a little counter through.

History. So when we're talking about agile working, we're talking about things like working from home or working remotely, or dialing in or working different times and stuff like that. And it's worth pointing out that you know, for most of history, people have actually really been self directed in relation to their work. So a lot of people historically used to work from home. In fact, a lot of a lot of work took place in the home, right? And the distinction between work and sort of life as we think about it now is really a fairly recent concept, and for the majority of history, it didn't even exist at all. If you think about agrarian cultures, you kind of live, you go out, you sort out stuff in your field, you come home, and so on. And even when you get into medieval times, most work was fairly individual based. And quite often people were working in work premises that were effectively a bolt onto their house, right? So like back then, bakers would work in their house. You know, blacksmiths would have a forage next to the house. Weavers are important in a lot of history. Would do weaving in their home, you know, so work and home was really intertwined. You'd do your production in your house. You'd take a break when you want. You'd be self directed, you'd work as and when you could, using the technology you had around the other constraints of your life. And it was all really interwoven.

If you go back quite a long way, some of the bigger organizations, things like the military courts, church, governments and things like that. People who kept a lot of records, had larger organizations, and during the Renaissance, they started to grow and get bigger, particularly within Europe. We're ignoring earlier empires, you know, China, Rome, places like that, where there were historic record keeping and bureaucratic organizations.

So bureaucracy, which is really sort of Office control, or something like that, was coined in France in the mid 1700s and it sort of reflected the growth in office culture there. And that's one of the times in our timeline when people started really coming together in workplaces to work. And then along comes the Industrial Revolution, moving on from the sort of medieval times, and that was a huge change. That was one of the biggest, Pivotal things that happened here. And what happened with the industrial revolution is it really disrupted the historic association of work and home. So people were pulled into off, sorry, pulled into factories to work. The means of production were changed.

Centralized capital supported the acquisition of larger means of production by owners of industries, and they brought the workers in. And what happened then is people started really separating work and home. So you're at home, but you just do your home stuff there, and then you go into work. And when you're in work, you use works technology. You use work's time. You work in a structured way and their way of doing things. So really, the industrial revolution is what started to to drive a big catalyst towards work in the way that we know it. Now,

in 1833 I kind of like this. The UK factory Act was passed just to give a perspective on work life balance and where we are now. And the UK factory act, what it did was it banned children under nine from working in the textile industry, which is good for children who are 10 to 13, it limited them to working only 48 hours a week. And for children who were between 14 and 18, it limited them to 69 hours a week and no more than 12 hours a day from their employment. So I just chucked in there because I thought that was kind of interesting. Wow, how far we have come. Yeah, it's a big change, isn't it?

So, you know, industrialization brought people into working environments in this new way, which is the way we sort of think of them. Now, if you move on to early 20th century, early 20th century, you'll see that there were big rises in larger organizations, and with the larger organizations came

greater needs to administer them, and combined with rises in early 20th century technology, so things like Electricity, telephones, telegraphs and modern transport that made commuting easier, you started to see a real growth in offices, and that transition from factories to the offices further embedded our understanding of the integration of work into somebody else's premises, with their means of production and stuff like that. Then along comes World War Two, and that redefines the role of women, and suddenly women own and deliver serious roles and have a meaningful working set of skills and capabilities and desires within the Western world and after the after the war, they retained jobs and stayed in the labor market and increasingly worked in more office based roles. So all of this sort of arc of history that we're talking about here has led to the growth of work as we know it, that sort of work culture mixed labor force working in an office, working under direction and structure and with somebody else's technology to achieve a goal. Then along comes the 1970s and it's in the 70s that we start.

See the first sort of reflections on moving towards what we consider a more agile approach. So they were finding free love. Why not find free work too? Is that just about I think, I think what they were really finding was gridlock on the way to work and rising oil prices and regulations over environmental concerns. Oh, you practical. It's boring, isn't it? It's boring for trees. So the oil shock of 1973 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, anyway, so all these things were happening, and people started to think that actually, commuting might be a bit of a waste of time. It might damage the environment, it might be costly. So why don't we start to experiment with telecommuting? And people started looking at this in the 70s. Going into the 80s, a lot more people started to try it, organizations on boarded it a bit, but it didn't really take off. And there were some counter arguments to telecommuting, which is a bit of a precursor to our remote working. And then in 90s, a big step occurred, and the US, government and federal agencies introduced telecommuting and started to promote it. And that's really when, sort of, our interpretation of agile working started to take off, moving into the noughties, and a lot more people start to get involved. Smaller organizations support more agile working, and technology comes along that makes it easier. So you know, the internet gets up and running. People can dial into shared files. People have cheap data connections, people have cheaper telephony. All that stuff makes a big difference. And then the last shift in this journey is what's happened in, I guess, for 2010, and up to now, which we alluded to earlier, which is a real shift towards

agility and flexible working as a strategic driver for an organization, right? So a lot of the earlier stuff was around what's the benefit for the employee? It's a bit of a perk. And then once you get into the 2010s particularly post financial crisis, people are looking at

competition, at cost control, and they start to see that agile working practices could be a differentiator and a strategic driver for their organizations. So that's kind of my whistle stop history of agile working. It just makes you realize, I think that's not fair. It makes me realize how often some of our modern practices have their roots in they were trying to solve one problem, noticed how well it worked for something, and then started thinking about how it could solve some other problems. So they, you know, there's an issue around, there's certainly an issue around, sort of the 1970s and some of the challenges to the economy and what was happening, and that would mirror Britain, certainly. And then suddenly they go, hang on a minute. There's opportunity here. There's cost savings. People could be happier. They, you know, we could be seen as the good guys. Yeah, there's, there's things to be one, yeah, and it makes that flip over into strategic and, you know, there's some really good benefits for it still good for individuals, but there's a bit of a cynical hat sometimes as well around sometimes James, well, you know. So I should probably share with, share with our listeners, that I am highly cynical about flexible working in the way that we see it? Yeah, currently, I have huge concerns about the way it's deployed as a supposed employee centered approach. But in actual fact, I think the benefits far, far outweigh for the organization. And I think I think a lot of what the challenges that we see at the moment in the workforce are coming potentially from people being able to being unable to distinguish between work and home. Yeah, and I've got similar cynicism. I'm maybe not as far along that spectrum as you, but I've got some concerns about this as well. So

next little bit from me, I guess, is around components of flexible, agile working actually, you touched on these earlier. I don't know if you want to jump in and so, yeah, no, I probably saw a bit of your thunder. It just got me thinking about, I thought, I think that that definition is just so helpful, and it's not, it's not even a definition. It's a very clear set of it

effectively leads you to where you can make policy. So I think, particularly for those of you that are listening, because you have an ability to impact policy within your organization, or you might even have been asked to draw up a flexible working policy yourself. I think that their definition and their way of thinking about it and their core components are really helpful. So agile Future Forum, this is the Agile food forum that you got, you found, and I think really helps. And so they've got the when, the where, the what we do, and the who does it. And I think that's a really straightforward way of thinking about it. It's when people work, and that's everything from job sharing and Flexi time through to compressed hours and to stage retirement. Those who don't know stage retirement is effectively where you plan to reduce your hours over a period of time. Yeah, four days a week, whatever works. So ease yourself out of the workforce. Last week, we talked about how many years

I did a piece of research last week in a group, and it was talking about how many years before retirement you disengage. The average is three. Okay, so.

So, so I thought that was really interesting. So basically, your your number, and the theory is it's not about age at all. Yes, three years before you retire. So clearly, get the most out of you before

then. So the there's the when, there's the where. So fixed desk, host, desking, shared space, multi site, home based mix. And then obviously, what I mentioned, which is the idea that actually, you should be allowed to find space that works for you on that just someone else can say you said, it's not that common that you can do it. But in financial services, the organization that I worked at was a mixed, you know, mixed group, but it had, amongst other things, a retail branch network. And one of the things that people that who were sort of, you know, corporate or head office, could do is I could choose to work in any branch. So you could go into your office. Or when we brought in Agile working, you could say, Okay, well, there's a local branch. If it's just on the road for me, why don't I go work in the Office of that local branch? I can still get a bit of a community sense. I don't need to be in. How many people did that a mix. I knew a fair number of people in my teams who've done that at different points. See, I would think that would think that would be hugely valuable. I think for all of the accusations that head offices always get around being distance, not understanding the issues within the regional network, I just think that would be brilliant. It's good. Yeah, I'd like to see more of that good. So there's the where there's and I think important to note about the where is, we should mention, probably the whole concept of fully remote, working so international. There is a real trend at the moment to say, Oh, you can go and live in Bali, I think, aside from the massive issues that that creates around time zones where you suddenly find yourself having to get up at three in the morning to have conversations, generally, that's also would fit within the where people work. And then there's the slightly more complex what people do. So this concept of allowing people to self select their tasks, to apply for condiments in different areas, to rotate the roles they do through the team. And you've mentioned something called Flexi teams, which I suspect is similar to what I would think about as project working. So where, effectively, I've worked in an organization where there's a little core team of people who effectively analyze what the what the role is for the organization or the client, because it's consultancy. And then they literally pick teams, drag and

drop it, gotta blend it, land them and what it means. The great thing about that is that it means that

really practical stuff, like, if you generally are quite happy to work internationally, but you've got a baby coming in your family, and you're thinking about how to plan that you might want to stay more local so they can plan all of those kind of things into the workload. It does, however, also mean that those people have a huge amount of power, which is an extraordinarily unusual situation where, effectively, a team of administrators hold all the power over a wider organization, and creates huge amounts of tension sometimes, anyway. So there's what they do, and then finally, this area of what were, who works, in terms of,

I guess, contractual arrangement is quite often the way. Where do you source your research? Are you sourcing people on a job by job basis? Are you controlling freelancers, fixed on Contractors. Are you working with permanent employees? Is everybody temporary? Yeah, or do you have no employees at all? And I think it's really important that model is coming out more and more people who own their own small business. And effectively they contract organizations in Yeah, and they outsource everything, yep. And interesting public sectors moving very heavily towards a place where they only employ commissioning, yeah, experts, which is a, probably a political conversation we should have after the podcast, but I really liked it anyway. So thank you for finding the Agile working forum, because that's really helped me get to grips with this subject and and what does and doesn't sit within this this remit.

Cool. So let's chat about, maybe what some of the benefits and risks are around this. I mean, I think that'd be good idea. You touched earlier on the fact that you're a bit cynical about it. I'm a bit cynical, but I've seen some benefits of it as well. I guess when we think about benefits and risks, we need to think about benefits and risks from the employee perspective. So if you're thinking about, you know, entering a sort of flexible working arrangement, what do you get out of it, and what are some of the downsides that you could face? But likewise, from an organizational perspective, you know, what are potential benefits you get as an organization, and what are some of the risks that you face? And

I think, you know, in 10 or 15 years, we'll probably have a better view on on all of these as it becomes more prevalent, but for the time I think we'll be doing I should also I think we'll be doing it better. I think we have to acknowledge that one of the reasons I'm cynical, and certainly possibly you is that we are very early doors in this journey, and we're not necessarily getting it right at the moment. And that doesn't mean my cynicism is about the right now, not about the potential. Yeah. Okay, so I guess we start from, let's start from an employer perspective, and think about what some of the benefits are, right? So it's got to be, it's got to be, you know, put out that early on, that one of the drivers for this is cost. You know, people reduce cost, and you reduce costs in different ways. So one of the big costs. First savings that you can get through this is around,

I guess, your footprint and your desk space. So if you have people who only work in the office 60% of a time, and if you stagger that, you only need 60% of a desk space, or 60% of a footprint, and that can be a big savings, certainly in the industry that I've been in premium desk space that sets you back 10s and 10s of 1000s of every year. So if you can free up a few of those, you can make a real difference to your bottom line or your cost income ratio, or whatever metrics you look at. So saving cost from the Office perspective is there another thing is around saving costs from a labor perspective. So if you're in an organization that typically pays, you know, maybe over time or out of hours supplements and things like that, if you can, can restructure your the way that your employees work so that you minimize that without taking on for the cost. So if people work flexibly across times, and you maybe cover peak period through flexibility, as opposed to excess hours compensation, and you can save money there as well. And that would relate very heavily to the rise of the gig economy. We're seeing the Ubers and the deliveries in the UK of companies that are just sourcing labor purely for the hours they need them. Yeah. Care industry, that's interesting

from the employer's perspective. Another benefit is that if you're flexible in terms of things like the what people do piece that you spoke about, then you can move people into different areas of the organization. So if suddenly new projects essential and your workforce are agile in terms of what they do, you can re point greater numbers of resources to tackle those problems and sort of flow your resource and your capability in that new direction, which makes you more responsive and able to deal with new and rising things. It also makes you more likely to invest in your workforce, because if your workforce are more able to move between projects, you're much more likely to be able to keep them because there's different jobs available, particularly then investing in their soft skills becomes a much more valuable thing for you, particularly in an evolving labor market where new skills are always important. If you're if your employees have a proven ability to do that, then you're more likely to and where it's virtually impossible people to stay on top of what things are coming so fast that you might as well try and work with the people you've got on that.

Yeah. Other benefits are you can attract and retain people, right? So as part of your employee proposition, as the type of language that we'd use, but it, but if, if you promote yourself as a flexible or agile employer, then you can attract different people. So you used a different word. And I know we used a different word earlier, when we were talking about this, I did. I used for retain. I think I might have said something like trap. I think you said trap. It was a bit more. I think you might, might have said, You trap people, yeah, and you know, you see that, you see people who are maybe working three days a week in a job that they quite like, but would be very willing to move from but without other employment opportunities. It's, you know, if you've got a good employer who pays you well to work three days a week, you're going to find it very hard to get a substitute for that. So it does retain you.

It can promote your diversity and inclusion as an employer. So you can keep and attract people from different groups, people with different commitments. You can, you know, perhaps access

across gender more easily, particularly working parents. You can start to bring in people from a different disability strands, if maybe they've got physical needs where they struggle to work in a conventional office place, things like that. And you know, one of the last key benefits that raise is around productivity and engagement.

You know, if you provide agility to people in some, maybe even many instances where productivity can go up and so can their engagement.

So you've talked about the benefits, and I want to play the game where I get to talk about risks, okay, because you've made a really good case, and actually maybe think about a couple of things that I hadn't. So I really like the comment the conversation around disability, particularly where we know that in some cases, it's physically not possible to abduct certain buildings, certainly, because they're too old. And yes, in an ideal world, you'd move whole organizations. But wouldn't it be great if there were other solutions? And I also particularly where, having worked with disabled people, there, are certain there, I know a number that they physically can't leave their homes for certain periods where they're doing certain things. So wouldn't it be brilliant to be able to things come and go and yeah, so I hadn't thought about that. So thank you. It's an excellent, excellent point. And however, I do want to make employers aware of the risks that are involved in this. I think you've highlighted some here from from your research, and I think there's some others that I would add in. One is around loss of control.

Make no bones about it. If you have a disengaged person who is working remotely, it is going to be incredibly difficult to manage their workload and productivity, never mind re engage them, which is a whole other challenge you're not even going to get out of them. What. You're paying for effectively. So that's a huge issue. I think

change is much harder. I'll give you a very practical example, very quickly. So I've worked with a team that is a remote working administrative team that cover regions, and they happen to live roughly in their regions. What it means is, because they're not in one office together, they're not able to quickly notice the trends of the challenges in their process and change them, and it's also very hard to then implement those changes, because they're in four different places with four different qualities of internet, four different qualities of content, and they have managed things differently so that, and yes, there are processes that we put in place, but it's so much harder when they're far apart and they're not able to work together as a team and actually sit in front of the same screen. Yes, there are technological solutions, but they're not always that great. The other couple of challenges that I would just raise for employers is your your additional risk around

that responsibility for the mental and physical well being of yourself, and how much harder it is to monitor that. Yeah, that time, I think it's hugely difficult to monitor I think particularly if people are working in jobs that don't have communication every day. For example, we work quite heavily in the nonprofit sector with people who write resources and write support materials they might be offered, you know, they might not have reason to talk to you in a week, and that touch base is really important to work. Think about how you might have to spend more money on your management because actually they're gonna have to touch base more often than you might do in an office. And I think that's really important financial risk as well as a health risk, occupational health risk and the other, the other risk that I would raise with organizations is your inability to track your culture effectively. It is so one of the things that I've seen in big remote working organizations is people self organizing into local pods, and then those communication

methods falling outside of traditional the organizational methods. And then what happens is, if things start to go stale in that team, or start to get frustrations, but there isn't a way for them to communicate those frustrations forward, or they don't feel confident, for whatever reasons. You have no idea that's happening. Yeah, and that's a huge issue. There can be a huge issue. It's unlikely, but when it happens, it's messy. So for me, I've just it should come with a massive health warning. Yeah, that that done badly. It is truly toxic. Yeah, it can and be toxic, not just the people, but the organization. Cool. That's a good set of counter arguments there. Yeah, sorry about that. It's good. It's good. Jenny J doomsday today. Yeah, okay, so what about how it works for people? Well, I'm gonna make the case for the benefits for employees, and then you can shoot me down. You should, because we both take advantage. So I've worked remotely and in a whole range of agile ways for multiple years to different degrees. And I've also had teams where I've had a mixture of people who work in different agile ways, some, you know, permanent home workers all the way through the scale of,

you know, flexible and different hours and so on. So from my perspective, there really are some some good benefits out there for the employees. So from a personal perspective, I've found that I don't actually like to work remotely all the time, but I like the opportunity to do it and to have some variety in there. For me, I find that outdoor working gives me a little bit more control. It lets me balance my life a little bit more. I can do a little bit of my own life in the middle, I like to go running. I can run over lunch. That actually makes me feel fresher in the afternoon, I can sleep a bit longer. I've got a bit less travel. I get more time to dedicate to work, I feel fresher and because I've done the odd bit of personal work interspersed with my core deliverables. By the time I get focused home time or focus time for myself at the weekend, I'm actually in a better place to enjoy it and recover. So that's good for me. I also find that I get more autonomy when I'm allowed to be a bit more self directed in terms of my tasks from the, you know, what people do perspective, I think that's really good for me.

And in terms of where people work, I've, you know, I mentioned, you know, people working in branches and things like that. I've, I've worked in different sites, in different locations, multiple times, and that's a benefit for me as well, because when I've had the sort of discretion to choose where I work, it makes it easier for me to work with different teams at different times and sort of broaden my network and build my relationships, which I think helps the organization as well as helping me. So, you know, some of the key drivers for me really come back to that balance of work and life. You know, work life balance is aided by this, and I found it useful. So I guess for me, that's kind of a case for employee benefits as a result of

agility, okay? And I should, I should, before I go on to make the case against, or at least the cautionary tales. Let's call them. I.

I should add that I still choose to work incredibly flexibly in a number of ways that I work. So it would be unfair of me not to admit that before I now go on to trying to warn everyone off it. Yeah, I think, and for me, there's some really obvious things. It can be incredibly lonely. I think quite often, I think particularly middle and senior management, who tend to be involved in a lot of meetings, either virtually or in real time, don't notice that quite how, how different it might be for people who are repetitive or more more basic. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I think if you spend all your teleconferences anyway, almost doesn't matter what you are, because you get you get benefit from seeing people, but you're kind of doing the same thing at home. Yeah. Thing at home. Yeah, although, although I have some some friends in Organizational Psychology who would argue that physical, face to face interaction of some form doesn't have to be with your workplace, it does matter during the day, if nothing else, just ties get really tired.

And you know what? There absolutely are technological and process driven solutions to that. But I do think it also creates scope creep. I think that's absolutely true. I think the more flexible you are about what you do, the more likely you are to end up doing more than you're meant to. I think you get so you've mentioned, you've put down here, it's interesting, penalized for being out of sight, and the way I see that most clearly manifested is missing out on opportunities, missing out on the ability to hear office chat and be able to put yourself forward. And particularly it, I think it probably happens less than big corporate, well organized, high, huge HR department supported organizations, but where there's only 80 of you in an organization, if you're in the office regularly, and here, there's probably about projects you can put yourself forward for those projects if you're not there, you can't hear about Yeah, for me, part of what I was getting out there was kind of out of sight, out of mind, you know. So you miss out on opportunities. But also people kind of forget about your contributions. And maybe when you're getting to performance rating or performance management time, you're you're not as high up people's agenda as you would be if you were physically in the office. I think, I think also,

if you are easy to manage, it's very easy for you to just be seen as a placeholder. And it becomes a very attractive thing to leave you there. I think it lends itself to

an erosion of security when you think about particularly the gig economy, which we mentioned earlier, a hugely worrying thing that, you know, as I get older, I recognize that my frolicking 20s where I really didn't care about job security because I was so confident valuable I was, and also I knew that, you know, for the for what I was doing at the cost it was I was way over delivering thing. Because I get older, and I recognize that I will have other interruptions in my life. I will have parents who will need care, potentially. I will have other responsibilities to my family. I will have wider financial, you know, commitments. And you move towards retirement, you start to worry about that stuff. And I think if you are working in a contract that is wholly suited the organization versus a person, it adds a depth of of risk. And I think that that destabilizes you, and it's a worry if you're not managing that effectively, and if it's not your choice. So I actually see some of my concerns about this as even broader. So some of my concerns are more societal, and what it kind of feels like is going on here is that, you know, the cost of production is being increasingly moved to employees, so you provide your own computer, you use your own footprint, you do all that kind of stuff, and you're kind of alone, almost as if you're

sort of semi entrepreneurial. At the same time, a lot of the benefits of production continue to adhere to the organizations that you work for, and that sort of societal shift I find potentially risky, potentially destabilizing. So this cycle is all the time, right? I mean, I always think about YouTube. YouTube always makes me laugh. It doesn't make me laugh at all, but the concept that for a very brief period, people who are producing their own music were able to market it themselves, find themselves and it became a thing. And then what happened? All the major music labels suddenly hired people to be YouTube scouts. They took over all the accounts. They started using it themselves. It was one thing I am confident, it is that sooner or later, big pince Ness will try and bring everything back together and own it all, because ultimately, what they're ironically doing is outsourcing the means of production, right? Yeah, and if you go back to some point, someone's going to work out, but they don't need a corporation to do that, and they can take it in Europe exactly, and then, and then that will be really threatening to major organizations.

But I, you know, I want to, I want to mention just one other risk to employees that maybe doesn't get talked about as much. And I think it's around

around be understanding how much effort it takes to self regulate your day and to self regulate your work. Yeah, so I love I, you know, I think Obama's a fabulous speaker, but I also think he made a really good point that's been made by Steve Jobs and by made by low people that you get you. Get decision making tiredness,

and it's a huge thing. And all of the really smart people who have the resources basically spend a lot of money taking that problem away totally. And they get other people, they they buy expensive single item clothes. They can do it again and again, all of that stuff. When you choose to take on flexible working. Yes, it frees you up, but it also requires, I would say, it takes an extra 15% of my day to have the process in place, to manage my time, to manage my choices, to not so yes, doing the laundry, James, that is a great thing to do, but then ending up accidentally clean the kitchen and taking the dog for a walk, not so much. Yeah, and for me, who is, it's very much of the moment, and likes to sort of get very easily distracted, huge procrastinator. It's exhausting, yeah, and it depletes you, and it makes you, it makes you almost yearn for someone else in structure, right? Yeah.

You want lack of choice. I want to know where I'm meant to be. I want someone to just want to be told what to do, how to do it. I don't want it every day, yeah, but once in a while, it'd be really nice when you're emotionally tired, which is, by the way, why we quite regularly record these podcasts on a Friday afternoon. Because James just told me to do that, and it was so much easier to say yes. And even I like it on Friday afternoons, right? Little treat at the end of the week, with a little treat at the end of the week, please. Can we have please?

Okay, anyway, so that's me just making the case for and it's not making the case against it. It's, it's a cautionary tale, yeah, of don't it's not it like anything in the world of work. There is no one answer. It's not going to be the perfect solution. We need to work with it. We need to do it well, which I think goes on segues really nicely into your list of the week? Yeah, so we've done our research around that. We've talked about history, we've talked about some core components, modern, flexible, they're agile, working. We've talked about some of the benefits and risks for individuals and leaders. And what we're going to do with a list of a week this time is quickly run through five points for you that are all around you know what you need to think about if you're looking at maybe introducing flexible or agile working in your organization. So they're just five points. I guess we'll just run through them quickly, share a few little thoughts on them, and then pop on to a few hints and tips. So five points, number one,

would flexible or agile working work for your organization, right? You've got to consider that before you take it on. So take it on. It sounds kind of obvious, right? It's like,

it's like a truism, or, you know, whatever that word is, what I'm looking for. But it's important to think about, you know, if you're going to do this, does it work strategically for you? Does it align with your customer base? Can you still meet your core strategic objectives, if you have people who work in a flexible, agile way, and there's a really practical way to think about it, if you write down your teams or your people on a spreadsheet in groups, and if you know the majority of them are doing jobs that are linked to a place, whether it's a factory, a laboratory, a hospital,

or where the majority of your people are linked to very specific technical tasks, it's going to be harder for you. I'm not saying it's not doable. The NHS have done it, but it's going to be much harder if you run a customer services system, it's a shift based system, and you're only open nine till five, it's going to be harder for you to offer flexibility of hours. So just that's a really obvious one. It's not the right thing for every organization. And indeed, there are some organizations in some countries that do the complete opposite. They will say, No, everyone works the same hours, and they only do these hours, and nothing else is flexible. And in time,

you know, I think it's really important that there is different organizations doing different things. But yes, that first question is crucial, James, does it work for your organization? Yeah. Can you see, is it fit? Is it theoretically possible? Yeah. So then number two, do you have a technology to make it work, right? I mean, if you're doing this, you're letting people work in different places, in different times, and maybe choosing their work. So you've got to ask yourself, can they communicate effectively? Do you have a telephony to let you do that. Do you have maybe virtual meeting systems for to let you do that? You know WebEx or other video conferencing type things? Do you have virtual collaboration tools, maybe messaging platforms, things like Slack? Have you got document sharing platforms? Can you all access the same information?

Do you have reliability over systems that you have? Do you have security over the systems that you have. Can you comply with regulation about data control in relation to the systems that you have? And do your teams have skills to do that? Right? If you're considering doing this, you've got to ask yourself all those questions, because if you can't answer yes to a lot of those, then you'll have downtime. You'll have wasted time. You'll have people who are frustrated because they can't work effectively. Relationships might break down. You might lose data, you might breach regulatory compliance issues. You know, there's a whole bunch of stuff that can go about if the technology doesn't work, so make sure the technology that you're thinking about using is fit for purpose, for what you might try and do.

Put it in sorry about that. Must have liked that. That's me not turning off all my devices at once. Yeah. Okay, so then on to my personal favorite, and the one that,

without fail, everyone always answers yes to surprise, surprise, but I'm not sure is, and that is,

are you sure your leaders and your managers have the skill set to effectively manage in a flexible working environment. And the problem is that this question quite often gets asked in rooms where only leaders and managers are. I would strongly urge you to talk to the rest of your staff about whether they feel they could be appropriately managed and led through an agile working whatever the process that you're looking at and whatever the policies you're looking at, because it's really matters. I've seen it done badly, and it's, it's quite literally a horror show. Yeah, people feel disengaged. They feel unsupported. They get very frustrated. Employee engagement drops through the floor. All of these things are an issue, and I think there's some really practical questions, are they going to be good role models? Do they themselves and understand? Can you trial it with them to see if they can effectively manage the processes? Do they even understand what it is? Do they understand that it's not just about working? You know, one of my favorite things is when they think it just means that they can phone all of their employees up at 10 o'clock at night. Yes, they're worried that is not agile working. So it's really important to check their understanding of it. Do they have a good ability to manage meetings through the virtual systems. You know, are they it literate themselves? Because that in itself, is sometimes a challenge. And I

think one of the things is, how are they going to be able to mediate between teams when they're remote? How are they going to do are they going to do it on a Skype call? Are they actually going to bother to get people together remote? I think it's really important. So for me, this is a piece of work that it's not just have they got the skills, but more importantly, what skills are they going to need for your policies and how you're going to make sure they have them, or how are you going to actually, it can't just be a yes, yes. I'm confident, hand up in the air. I'm sure I can do this. You've actually feasibility. It's a proper, it's a proper piece of work. So that's, that's that one's my

real bug bit, I guess. And then I'm going to ask you to explain a little bit about the next one, because I know that it's really important to you as well. Yeah. So next point for me is around your organization's culture, and whether or not your organization's culture can support flexible and agile working. It's hard, it's hard to really sort of sometimes separate that from leadership. But culture is its own thing, and depending on the ways of working, you know, the way stuff is done around here in your organization, you may or may not be able to effectively implement agile working so, for example, if your organization is the type of organization that can cope well with change and new things, then you're more likely to be able to move to an agile working approach. Then if that's not the way your organization works.

Similarly, if you've got quite an empowered culture where people take ownership and have clarity over what they do and are sort of self directed, then that's a good sign. If, conversely, though people are scared to make decisions, scared to direct themselves, to some extent, scared to speak up, and leaders don't let them do that, then it'll be hard for you to successfully adopt an agile working approach.

Next point for me under here is around trust, right? Moving to Agile working takes a huge amount of trust. Leaders need to trust that employees will do what they meant to do, and and employees need to trust each other in a peer group, but they'll actually work well. So making sure that you have trust is important.

Having a culture that means that you can learn from failure, and not, you know, fall over the first time something doesn't work. Is it really important as well? Because when you're trying to implement something like this, stuff will go wrong quite a bit, and you'll just have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and get on with it and learn from it and do better next time. And if your organization can do that, then you're likely to make this a success. If you can't do that, then it might not really be worth trying, because chances are it'll fall over. And then the last point is around sort of a collaborative and supportive nature and culture of your organization. If you have a type of organization where people will help each other introduce something new. Then again, this is more likely to work If, however, you're more of a individualistic type organization. Then potentially this might not work for you, but it might work, but it's just something that you need to think about. So really, for me, that's a few points on culture, and the real call out is that you just need to think about culture, right? I mean, assess your culture and see if you think it's robust enough to help you implement flexible projects. Yeah. And I think, I think if you know you can always tell some stuff by how people respond to the idea. You float the idea, and if people absolutely love it, just check it's not because they hate working where they're working, because that's never a good reason. But otherwise you'll get a much better sense. So the fifth one on your lovely list of thinking about these things is probably the least sexy it is, but it's actually, you know, the bottom line is, it's the most important, and you absolutely have to get this done before you start a process. And it's do you have the right policies, processes, procedures in place to allow your team to be successful and to allow the policy to. Be successful.

It's not. It's not fun, because everyone wants to think about the flexibility, but it's going to be much harder, and you're going to need much clearer processes on assessing people's productivity. And that's a good thing, by the way. You don't want to be ever accessing people productivity by how often people turn up for work, but things like absences, yeah. How are you going to monitor them? And they can be self regulated. How do you build trust? Regulated. How do you build trust? You're going to have to have you come back to that idea of trust. What policies are going to be in place to measure that and to understand what that means for people and what you expect, what in terms of people's assignment? How much so? One of the big problems we had, I saw someone implement a process and implement a flexible working policy, but would regularly arrange meetings within three days in head office, sure, which is just crazy. You can't say to someone you're based in Brighton, and we don't your normal working place is bright and then given to three days notice. Yeah? So you know what? On a very practical level, you have to have an agreement. You have to what's what's acceptable, what's your expenses policy? Because that, trust me, it's gonna go sky high and all of these things. And I think you know, one of the ways to do it is a look at all the policies you've got and what needs updating. Everyone always forgets that bit. They always write the new policies and forget about the odd ones. How are you gonna discipline? How does that gonna change? How are you gonna manage disputes? How are you gonna be fair? How do you treat? Oh, and don't even start me on fairness. But how are you going to treat people in any hub world, offices versus away? You know, one of the classic ones that I always happens right, is that I've worked an office for a number of years where they give everyone remote working everyone the afternoon of Christmas Eve off. Okay, right? But if you're in head office, they always arrange their team days out and lunches on that day, sure, right? So they effectively get two thirds, three quarters, yeah. So right homeworkers, because they need that time, they tend to have their Christmas, you know, during a meeting or in an evening or something, after a day that they've been at the office. So consequently, they feel like they left out because they're still sitting there until like two o'clock in the afternoon. Everyone else disappeared off. So think about stuff like that, because, trust me, it really matters to people. So that kind of sums up the list of five. So just a reminder when you're thinking about it. Does it fit with your organization? Can your organization actually do it? Do you have the technology, or can you get it to make it work. Does your leadership team and your managers have the skills to effectively

manage your workforce? Will your organizational culture support or will it be able to adapt to flexible working and and what's the practical policies, processes that you need? Do you have them? What do you need to adapt? Great list, really helpful. And we'll make sure to share that on the website cool. So quickly, stories from the coalface.

I guess we've got a range of things that we could cover here. One thing that I wanted to call out is something that I found contentious in different places and that I've seen cause problems is around compressed hours. Okay, right? So I think it's just a specific example and maybe something to watch out for in a lot of a world where I've worked well, actually, I guess we should start by saying what compressed hours are. Compressed hours are when somebody works maybe 40 hours over the course of a week, but instead of working 40 hours over eight hours a day for five days, they'll compress that and work that in four days, maybe working from, I don't know, eight till six, or whatever it happens to be, over those four days. Now I've seen that cause problems, because for that to be effective and to be fair and respect about fairness and equality, it needs to happen in a place where other people aren't already working eight till six. So in my industry, I've seen a lot of instances where somebody has compressed hours, and that means that they get paid for a full time job, and they work eight till six or similar, on Monday to Thursday. However, other people who have a full time job work eight till six, five days a week, and so they get paid less, and you get disgruntlement and disappointment. So I just wanted to check that out there as as you know, a real life story and something to think about. You know what? It's

so common. It's untrue in our industry, because everyone works sport, where I've worked quite a period of my time doesn't take place Monday to Friday, nine to five mostly takes place in evenings and weekends. So for me, one of the challenges is, how do you manage toil? And of course, days in lieu, when actually it's a part of your job, and you go into the job expecting to work evenings and weekends to a point. Yeah, yeah, right. So

the best organizations trust that you will make that work. However, there is a real conflict with public sector organizations who make you count all the hours, but also give you all those hours back. So what you end up with is two people in very similar jobs, one in non profit, charging. Nonprofit, charity, and one in a public sector, who have two very different toll, new toil and loo policies and and that creates, when they're working in teams together, it creates massive friction. Yeah, because they're like, hang on, I'm working this evening and getting time off you're not. Yeah, it's about a quality piece. But they don't always, and people never.

Are able to see the whole package. No matter, of course they do, they never see focused on your own. And it's really so it's really important you share it as a package, yeah, because when you don't, when you don't, make people understand that flexible working is part of a bigger, holistic approach, you end up with people picking out the bits that don't work for them and getting angry about it. And that's that's so and that's why everyone runs away from it in the end. And yeah, goes back to traditional working because they just, it's so much prepared foot to make people comfortable with it. So that's my I've seen that, and I've seen a massive route take place with a manager, because they were like, literally, look what he gets. Yeah, it's like, so that you have the autonomy to do what you like the rest of the time. That's not the point. Yeah. So I get this three hours off transparency and fairness. Seems like some good messages from the COVID face, yeah for this week. Okay, top tip closing out.

Oh, okay. This is a really personal one. If you think that your personality is such that you really benefit from working with people face to face, and that it helps you manage Think twice before you join an organization that heavily promotes flexible working. Yeah, I know that sounds cautionary, but I'm

not saying don't do it. But if that's where you get your steam, it's really hard to fake that in a room. I mean, I got a dog to try and talk to, yeah, and, trust me, she doesn't brainstorm that Well, this week, I've actually got exactly the same top tip, you know? I mean, I really think we've both got the same word of caution here, which is, from my perspective, I'd say, if you're considering flexible working or agile working, I guess remote working, really make sure it's right for you. So exactly the same point, because I've seen people who have

suffered and declined as a result of moving and adopting remote working working from home. It's hard to do. You know, humans are often social beings, and even if you've got a good team remotely, it's not the same as being in the office and being part of all of that. Can I add a tip? And it's not mine, it's someone I know who's not here, who does work from home, and his advice to me when I started, which I didn't take at first, and I now did, is start monitoring your day of how you feel, yeah. So he really regulates his day. So first two hours of the morning where he's at his tip top brain wise, is where he reads all the academic papers that he leads to, or he writes big, chunky emails and pieces of research. He always, always goes out for lunch, yep. So he goes. He sees that as a cost. And he's like, it's in my it's in my plan, yeah. And he will go out to lunch, even if it's on his own, ideally not. He usually phones me selling around the corner, but he will go out to lunch every single day, no matter what. And he schedules at least one face to face Skype call, yeah, every day, powerful, powerful stuff. And those three things he said, went from being miserable to brilliant in no time. I was like, Oh, I'll Nick that. Yeah. So those, that's my top tip courtesy of volume. Ive Cool. All right. Well, that's the end of another episode and the end of another week. So I guess it's just goodbye from me, yeah, and it's goodbye from me until next time,