How flexible employment can boost your business

This blog post has been produced by Dr Daniel Wheatley (pictured), Reader in Management at the University of Birmingham, for the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce as part of the 2024 – 2025 Growth Through People campaign.

Growth Through People, is a flagship Chamber campaign, supporting organisations to increase their productivity and grow, through improved people management and leadership skills. For the first time, Growth Through People will be delivered throughout the year, having launched with the Growth Through People Conference in March 2024, and will include the delivery of a number of events, as well as digital content, throughout the next 12 months.

Thanks to our Headline Sponsors – Aston University, Lumien and Curium Solutions- all Growth Through People events are free to attend. Interested readers can find out more and register to attend Growth Through People events here.

Flexible working has become the defining feature of our experiences in the workplace in recent years.

Hastened by swift changes to working patterns during the COVID-19 lockdowns, rights that have been enshrined in UK Government policy since 2003, have recently been expanded to offer day one rights for requesting flexible working.

If recent estimates from the Annual Population Survey are anything to go by, ongoing demand for hybrid home-workplace and flexible working more generally is unlikely to slowdown anytime soon.

Increasing numbers of employers across different sectors will need to realise the benefits of flexibility, for themselves and for their employees, to attract and retain talent.

The benefits are clear. Employees can create a work/life balance that better enables them to ease stressors which can otherwise lead to absence.

You can use it to increase workforce diversity, expanding the potential talent pool to other locations and to those who may otherwise find standard 9-5 work routines difficult to manage around other responsibilities.

Evidence remains mixed, but flexible working can increase productivity; employees engage with work on their own terms and benefit from the ability to mould work to fit their daily routines, driving higher engagement and job satisfaction.

There remains, however, varied levels of awareness over flexible working decisions, and as my own research also shows, how employers implement their flexible working policies can create positive but also potential negative effects.

This doesn’t mean you should shy away from flexible working. On contrary, you should embrace it and think carefully about how your flexible working policy integrates into your broader operating context.

Are you creating new constraints or limitations for your staff? Does your policy work for the outcomes your business is looking to achieve? Do you have buy-in from the right people within your organisation to make flexible working work best for you?

Your line managers are the cornerstone of an effective flexible working policy, with effective co-ordination of employees and teams key to realising benefits from hybrid and other flexible working routines that create more diverse patterns of work.

Getting buy-in from your line managers is essential for you to move away from a one-size-fits-all strategy and ensure flexible working fulfils not only individual needs but that of your teams and the wider organisation.

Five ways to embrace flexibility:

1. Increase awareness of flexible working policies and engage in active promotion of benefits.
2. Develop training programmes and toolkits for your line managers and leaders to increase organisational capabilities and enable effective co-ordination of flexible working.
3. Create guidance on how to move towards a tailored approach that offers your employees choice and a voice in decision-making.
4. Promote the adoption of ‘inclusive flexibility’ to increase workforce diversity and inclusivity through the creation of a more flexible workplace.
5. Ensure that flexible working practices work for both the employer and employee, including considering alternatives to the use of core hours or onsite days in hybrid working, and avoiding rigid ‘fixed flexibility’ models.