Working from home. Unlimited holiday allowance. A four-day working week. Employers are increasingly offering flexibility in how we work. In the US in 2016, 43 per cent of employees said . We like these freedoms – but are they good for business?
Andrew Barnes thinks so. In late 2017, he read that workers were properly productive for only a few hours a day (see “Winning at work: how to plan your day (and avoid the afternoon slump)”), so he decided to at the trust management company he founded in New Zealand. The idea was that employees would focus more to get their work done quicker, and get a paid day off in return.
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How to win at work
Make your work work better for you – from dealing with pesky colleagues to taking the perfect break and doing less for more money
And they did indeed get the same amount of work done. Economist Helen Delaney at the University of Auckland, , says they felt “rested and rejuvenated upon returning to work, which enabled them to sustain the higher performance during the trial period”. She says the exercise has generated significant interest from trade unions and government. “There is curiosity, intrigue and a desire to learn,” she says.
“Working from home works if you can avoid the three enemies: fridge, bed and the TV”
Working remotely seems to bring similar benefits. In 2013, economist Nicholas Bloom at Stanford University in California carried out a randomised trial at Ctrip, a Chinese travel agency employing 16,000 people. He and his team split 250 call centre workers into a group that remained in the office, and a group that worked full-time from home for nine months. Productivity, measured in terms of orders booked and calls answered, . It rose a further 9 per cent when the employees chose where they worked: it became clear that working remotely was not for everyone. “There were some people who realised they did not get on with the three enemies of working from home: the fridge, the bed and the TV,” says Bloom.
Delaney agrees that choice is crucial when it comes to flexible working. “If employees have some discretion and control over when, how and where they work, then this is the significant factor.”
We should perhaps guard against too much flexibility, however. offered by the likes of business networking firm LinkedIn and streaming service Netflix suggests this reduces the total number of holiday days taken. With no set number of days allocated for time off, workers find themselves trapped in a competition to see who can work the hardest.
Take-home message: Flexibility works – up to a point
