The 3Ts of Flexibility
THIS CHAPTER SETS OUT THREE ELEMENTS that any flexibility program, big or small, must have to avoid situations like those discussed in the previous chapter.
These elements have a catchy name too: the 3Ts of Flexibility (which was a bit catchier when it started out as the 3Ts of Telecommuting, but that’s so 2017).
The 3Ts are: The Talk, Training, and Trial. And, seriously, it doesn’t matter if you have twenty-thousand staff and an entire department dedicated to rolling out this sort of thing, or it’s just you and a partner working from a garage. In order to have a successful flexible work program, the 3Ts are non-negotiable.
The Talk
The biggest blunder made by the firm we discussed in the last chapter, with their phone-it-in-Fridays, was that they didn’t have The Talk. The CEO just assumed that he knew what everyone wanted (one day of working from home, on a Friday), and that he knew the best way to give it to them, and then he just did it.
But, as in a romantic relationship, if you assume what the other person needs, and how they need it, and then you just do it, you’re leaving yourself open to all sorts of problems. Proposing to someone who doesn’t believe in marriage? Problem. Asking them if they’re ready to have kids when they thought they were having a casual Tinder fling? Problem.
Like the talk you should have early in a relationship before you launch into a flexibility program at work, you need to have The Talk.
This talk doesn’t have to be a symposium with PowerPoint presentations and Tim Cook or Elon Musk as guest speakers. It can be as simple as sitting down in a meeting room or at a café and having a chat about what flexibility means to everyone, including you.
This is a great opportunity to get to know people and what drives them personally. To find out what they love, where they feel that they have gaps in their lives, the ways work is either helping or hindering them in reaching their potential as humans, and where any non-fulfillment of needs might be getting in the way of their best work.
Make the meeting as non-judgmental as possible by showing your own vulnerability: talk about your kids, a novel you’re writing, your badminton team, mental health problems, stress from driving every day, trouble with distractions at work, or whatever it might be. Talk about your fears about a potential flexibility program as well – what you’re skeptical about, or what you worry may happen if people have more freedom and less oversight.
The meeting is a chance to find out what everyone knows about flexibility, and what they understand about productivity and how it’s measured. It’s a chance to find problems before they happen, which will be a big help when you start to implement the program.
Clearly this is a conversation that requires a balance of challenge and compassion. It requires a safe space in which people feel free to truly open up. It might be a good idea to have an expert, from inside or outside the company, to facilitate the meeting.
In contrast to the phone-it-in-Fridays debacle, Andrew Barnes successfully implemented a four-day workweek at Perpetual Guardian, and he did so by using The Talk.
He went into the meeting with an open mind and a blank whiteboard, and he didn’t assume a thing, except that there might be room for improvement. He didn’t assume what was best for his employees and managers. He didn’t assume what they wanted or needed. He didn’t assume he had all the answers. He talked to his employees. And he listened.
When it came to implementing the flexibility plan, Barnes gave everyone the opportunity to learn how to make it work. With this freedom, each team made the four-day week happen in their own, unique ways.
Another example of The Talk can be found in the most unlikely of places: A construction company called Mirvac implemented flexibility for all of its employees, including the construction workers.
We’ll look further into this case study in Chapter 11 (The Forgotten), but I’ll mention here that one important element of the program was that the business leaders let the employees tell them what they, as individuals, needed. The changes the business made were simple, but the program was hugely effective, and it was because the leaders kept their ears and minds open.
The Talk doesn’t stop: it’s a continuing conversation. It starts before the program is implemented, continues through the trial period, and is maintained well after flexibility is an embedded and normalized practice. Consistent communication is critical for the continued success of flexibility programs.
Training
The Talk can be incorporated into a training course or session, but it’s important to ensure that the training travels both ways, that it’s a constructive conversation rather than a roomful of people being told what they should think.
People at a company will have different expectations and perceptions about work and flexibility, different values, different motivators, different pet peeves, and different biases.
Because humans are not robots, we have extremely subjective lenses through which we view the world. More often than not, we tend to stick to our perceptions and understandings until we’re exposed to new ways of thinking.
After The Talk, during which people begin to understand each other’s views and needs, formal training on flexibility helps them to understand the theories and implications of flexibility and its connections to health and well-being, equality, and the environment.
I recommend that the following topics be covered:
• What is flexibility? The different types, the benefits, and the potential issues (this book is a good start!).
• Diversity and inclusion, unconscious biases, and discrimination, such as, for example, managers perceiving part-time work as lower in value than full-time work.
• Energy buckets and human needs, to create awareness that flexibility is needed for so much more than just caring obligations; it’s about being more human.
• What is productivity? How does flexibility improve it? How is it measured? (Make sure that management doesn’t consider “hours in front of the computer” as an appropriate measure for productivity – that useless measure can’t live in the same world as flexibility.
• Continuous improvement, using tools such as Pareto Analysis, the Five Whys, and value-adding and non-value-adding processes. Analyzing root causes and avoiding quick fixes.
• Using technology appropriately, such as ensuring that communication programs aren’t overused and can be turned off during particular times of the day.
• Setting ground rules as a team.
• Developing and running a flexibility trial.
The Talk and any related training should happen before you plan and run the flexibility trial.
Please, please, don’t run multiple full-day training sessions. Humans can function at a high level for a limited amount of time per day or per week, so having a training session that goes for seven or eight hours, and/or a whole week, will ensure that people don’t learn as well as they could. Those glazed-over eyes will deflect information like bullets off Captain America’s shield. Keep it to a few hours, max, if you want information to be retained.
Trial
I’ve had a long, continuing debate with myself – screaming at myself in the mirror until we’re both in tears – about whether the third T should be Trial or Trust, because trust is one of the most, if not the most, important aspects of implementing flexibility. Eventually I chose to call it Trial, because that’s the best way to build trust. It’s practical, it’s the means to the ends, and it works.
I feel for frontline managers. They’ve got it rough. Pressures from above, pressures from below. Budgets to meet, drama to dispel, customers to please, quotas to fill, fires to extinguish, all while being coaches, mentors, and motivators. Articles telling them that managing is no longer enough: they have to lead, inspirationally, like Denzel Washington in the last ten minutes of Remember the Titans.
Then they have to deal with employees asking for more freedom and flexibility. Or their boss having new KPIs for diversity, well-being, engagement, and happiness. And then they’re told that they need to work flexibly and leave the office early to make it easier for the employees to use flexibility and work fewer hours.
No wonder managers are resistant to flexibility!
But, in an inconvenient twist of fate, a crucial element of implementing a flexibility program is frontline managers encouraging and role-modelling its use. Managers have to be the biggest advocates!
So how do you turn the biggest skeptics into the biggest advocates?
Trial!
They have to see for themselves that this stuff works.
No amount of training and convincing will change someone’s belief system. After years of doing something one way, people believe that it’s the only way. It’s not until they see the light for themselves that they’ll believe in something new. And this is what happens time and time again to managers who resisted flexible work and then saw, in a trial, that it changed lives and turned employees into productivity monsters.
The three main case studies in Chapters 6 and 7 – Perpetual Guardian’s four-day week, Collins SBA’s five-hour day, and Ctrip.com’s telecommuting program – all started as temporary trials. After seeing the results for themselves, managers were more than happy to permanently adopt the practices.
At Perpetual Guardian, for instance, Andrew Barnes said that “during the trial, managers changed their perception from not trusting their employees to do this [work a day less while maintaining productivity] to trusting them.”
At Perpetual, and many other companies that have run flexible work trials, managers saw for themselves that productivity didn’t drop when people had more freedom, so their fear was assuaged. In fact, the opposite occurred: people became more engaged with their work, more creative, more productive, more likely to collaborate with their team, and all those other wonderful things that managers work so hard to engender.
There may be extra work and hurdles to overcome when a company introduces flexibility, but it pays off and makes a manager’s life easier overall. That’s how you turn skeptics into advocates.
There are other benefits to running a trial before making flexibility a permanent practice. These include:
• A trial allows everyone – staff and managers, and even customers and clients if they’re affected – time to adapt to this new way of working.
• Results of a trial can be measured: changes in productivity levels, absenteeism, turnover, engagement, health and well-being, customer satisfaction, errors or quality issues, and profitability. Measurement provides hard evidence for whether flexibility is successful or not from a business point of view.
• A trial gives people a risk-free period to try something they may have been concerned about asking for previously. Having a set time period for the trial, and having everyone involved, greatly increases the chance that people will try it and see the benefits themselves. (It’s not always the managers who need convincing.)
• A trial allows problems with the program to be discovered and solved. Issues aren’t an excuse to cut a trial short; they’re opportunities to improve, learn, and optimize.
• A trial uncovers poor management and work practices that may have been hidden in a non-flexible work environment. For example, business success may have been measured by whether people arrived at eight thirty and left at five. With flexibility this measurement is meaningless, and success will need to be measured in more meaningful ways.
• A trial provides a blueprint for scaling up and rolling out flexibility to the rest of the organization if only certain departments or teams were part of the initial trial.
A trial should last a few months to allow employees to acclimate to the changes and allow potential problems and their solutions to become apparent. It may take a year or longer to see changes in people’s health, but changes in health indicators (such as adequate sleep, subjective well-being, and exercise) will be seen sooner. Other results, such as changes in the number of sick leave days, productivity, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction, may be seen very quickly.
All staff must be involved in the development and implementation of the trial. You don’t know what people want and need if you don’t listen to them, so the trial won’t fulfill their wants and needs, leading to issues and most likely failure.
I’ll talk more about the specifics of structuring a trial in the context of the overall program in the next chapter.
A Warning About Technology
Technology was going to be one of the Ts, because technology and flexibility go hand in hand: improvements in technology enable working remotely, and as technology improves, more and more jobs will be able to leave the constraints of a single location.
But technology is a tricky friend, so instead of espousing its use with flexibility, or providing links to programs that will be quickly outdated, I decided it’s best to provide a strong warning:
On one hand, technology can be tool for working and collaborating from a distance, or for improving work processes in a team. On the other hand, it can be a tool for surveillance and micromanagement, and an even bigger disruptor of productive work than your loud colleague at the next desk.
As an example of the type of surveillance and micromanagement I’m talking about, a company called Time Doctor provides a service that
tracks the websites and applications used while people are working. Managers can receive a report with this information. Managers can also receive a report listing potentially “poor-time-use” websites such as Facebook, and how long they were used.
Time Doctor can also take screenshots of your employees’ computers while they’re working (this is an optional feature). The process of reviewing these screenshots is extremely quick for a management or HR person. The software also tracks keyboard and mouse activity so you’ll know if people are using their computers when they say they are.1
Services like this demonstrate a terrible distrust of employees. Part of the earlier description of work flexibility is that “people want to work”; it’s up to you to foster that desire and not stomp it to death by starving employees of their freedom and privacy.
Some communication tools originally served to enhance productivity by allowing conversations and sharing of information and ideas with multiple people at once. But those tools can become time and energy traps of the highest degree.
Slack, for example, is an instant messaging service that’s now used in many businesses. I’ve used it myself, and I’ve found that it does allow efficient communication from a distance, but damn! have I wasted some time on it. It becomes a drug. As with other social media pings or bings or twangs, Slack notifications provide a shot of dopamine straight to the brain, and it feels gooood. Each message not only distracts you from the task at hand, but it sets up a social reward feedback loop, further encouraging you to continue to send and receive messages from a colleague or friend.2
According to a study of large companies (five-hundred workers or more) by Time Is Ltd., the average employee sends more than two-hundred Slack messages per week, and power users belt out more than one thousand.3 It was also found that at these large companies “there are more Slack channels than there are employees,” meaning that each person has to keep track of multiple threads.
Instant messaging can also be a cheeky way of keeping tabs on employees when they’re working remotely: Why hasn’t Naomi replied to the message I sent ten minutes ago? She hasn’t even read it! Don’t fall into the trap of using surveillance methods – build a healthy relationship instead.
For the sake of people’s health and well-being, businesses should encourage less time on phones and social media, even the professional platforms like LinkedIn and Slack.
If something needs to be said, pick up the phone and have a focused discussion. That’s much better than sending twenty Slack messages over the course of a morning, each notification feeding an addiction and distracting from the task at hand. Or create time specifically for working together or building camaraderie, such as workshops or company lunches. Or put it in an email.