Mastering Flexibility: Five Steps to a More Productive and Happy Workforce
1) Trust - Assuming all your team members are working well and to their tasks and achievements. Moving away from presenteeism as the only measure for productive work. We deal with team members who are not performing but trust our team members to complete their roles as adults
2) Clear Targets - Ensuring our teams have clear, achievable and measurable targets, even splitting them into daily, weekly or monthly tasks ensures each team member knows what is expected of them, when they are achieving and not. These targets ensure everyone is on the same page in knowing what ‘good looks like’.
3) Encourage Company Culture - If values such as inclusivity, team spirit, connection and communication are important to your business, empowering teams to work in a way that suits their body, lifestyle and family/home set-up is crucial to ensuring a powerful company culture and long-term retention of clients. Considering agile (location) flexibility too. Empowerment and autonomy are the number one reasons employees stay.
4) Improve Staff Engagement - Employees who feel valued and heard are likely to remain in companies for longer, engage in their work and commit to the growth of the company. Valued employees are more productive and creative. They are likely to commit to their work long term with the company - asking how they like to work, for their ideas around flex helps!
5)Try it - Signing off on flex and a new way of working can be scary, for the business, managers and even the employee. There’s nothing wrong with trialling an arrangement, with clear objectives, targets and outcomes. Review the arrangement weekly and trial for 4-12 weeks. What works, what doesn’t, how is it working for everyone involved and give it time to work out the teething troubles!
