Large organisations struggle with offering flexible working because they are not open-minded enough.
Allowing employees to work from home, either permanently or with flexibility, is the future. Not only does it improve the employee value proposition thus making it possible to attract higher calibre talent, it also improves an organisations ability to retain its current top performers who might be considering a move to a competitor company to that offers similar positions with the option to work from home or flexible hours. Without the option of flexible working, you can lose your most valued employees, and overall productivity as time and money will have to be spent on new recruits, training, to possibly replacing the lost gem of an employee.
However, large organisations struggle with accommodating employee flexibility and often end up losing out on the best talent simply because they are not openminded enough to realise that there are just as many benefits to the company as there are to the employee.
These benefits include reduced overall infrastructure costs and overheads, reduced employee turnover, increased productivity and, lastly, a better environmental impact. If employees are not bound to just their basic office hours and do not have to waste hours commuting to work every day, they will be productive whenever and wherever they are able to work.
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There is also no need to spend money on big office space, extra equipment, extra connections, basic utilities and so on. Flexibility also stands in place of a pay increase where more employees are opting for flexibility or work from home offers in the place of a pay increase where they are benefiting more from this than a few extra Rands.
People working remotely have a greater commitment to their jobs. It becomes so important to find life balance and people treasure time in this busy rat-race world of ours. Putting full commitment into the time you spend on any one thing makes a big difference to the value in what you are putting your time into.
Technology is key and it opens the door to cover more areas for the services offered by the company, and ultimately means more business, more revenue. It is still very important to remain connected. With compliments of technology, there are more ways to do this than we could imagine. There are many CRM systems available to track work performance. One can also make use of Video calls for quick morning meetings, just to “check-up”, but we will stick to “morning meetings”. It is advisable to also travel or fly in for Monthly/ quarterly meetings just to keep the human connection filled up. The world and technology are moving faster by the minute and we have to keep up.
