Flexible working. Once upon a time it might have meant starting work a couple of hours later to drop the kids off. But in 2023, our expectations are much higher. Let’s look at what flexible working means in 2023.
“Flexible working” is a term banded around a lot in job descriptions and in articles about the modern workplace. Without a doubt, Covid changed the landscape in terms of how and where and when we all work. But “flexibility” mattered long before that. Right now, on Indeed.com, there are more than 75,000 job ads containing “flexible working” in the term.
Employers see flexibility as a way to attract talent.
But what is flexibility in 2023?
Location Flexibility
Flexibility over where you work is huge. Some people want to work from home, some want to work from Airbnbs while they travel. Some want to be in an office. But the reality is that most people favor hybrid working – a combination of some time in the office and some time remote. It makes sense. There’s something about face to face working with people that helps with collaboration. It also helps to build professional networking skills. Working from home constantly lacks any social stimulation and for many people, work is where they meet friends.
Of course, it’s not possible to work remote in some jobs. If you work in a restaurant, you pretty much have to be where the customers are, for example. But where your job does not rely on you being in any given location, the ability to choose that location is valuable.
So flexible working means giving people the options. And as job applicants, understanding what location flexibility you have is important at the application state for any position.
Flexible Hours
This extends beyond just finishing a little early to pick the kids up from school – although the ability to build your day around family commitments is important.
Truly flexible hours often means that employees get to decide their working hours – sometimes within a set part of the day – built around their lives.
For example, you might want to work 4 long days and have 3 off. Maybe you’d prefer to work much much earlier in the mornings and finish early afternoon.
Truly flexible hours, within the confines of hours it is necessary to work (for example if you have to be available on clients’ working hours) allow you to build your working week in the way you want.
Aside from helping with work life balance, it can also be a productivity aid as we very much know that people tend to be more productive at certain parts of the day than at others. So if you can build your hours accordingly, you can ultimately work smarter.
Job Sharing/Part Time Hours
Flexibility can also be about how many hours you do work. If an employee wants to cut their time in the office altogether (say, for example, after welcoming a new baby or looking towards establishing their own business) the ability to allow that is incredibly valuable too.
Allowing job sharing or simply an hours cut is useful for employees over the long term.
And Finally…
That above covers where people work from, when they work and how much they work. But is it possible to even become more flexible with employees over what they do?
Once someone has been with you for some time, you start to build a picture of their strengths and weaknesses and of what sort of tasks they perform better on. If you have employees who have different strengths and weaknesses but have similar roles, could you enable people to split their tasks with colleagues based upon strengths and weaknesses?
It’s an amazing time to be in the jobs market for employees as employers are becoming increasingly flexible. But perhaps our expectations of flexibility should go beyond just starting and finishing later.
