Featured Article Why Flex Work Is Not a Stretch – Workforce Management

Origins, Downfall of Flex Work

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Flexible work generally refers to arrangements in which employees have options regarding when and where they do their jobs. The term includes reduced-hour schedules and telecommuting, where workers connect to their employers and the rest of the business world from home offices or cafés. Flexible work began to take off with the widespread adoption of the Internet in the late 1990s. The emergence of nearly ubiquitous wireless connectivity and a generation of smartphones and tablet computers bolstered the trend.

Organizations also began to ask more of employees outside of regular work hours, thanks in part to increasingly global operations and more competition. Heightened demands on workers’ time fueled workers’ interest in programs and policies that gave them a measure of control of their schedules—flex work became a primary means for people to achieve a “work-life balance.” Parents in particular have treasured flexible arrangements so that they can manage busy family schedules even as they pursue careers.

Overall, academic studies suggest that job flexibility helps companies and workers. But research also indicates companies haven’t bent over backward for all their workers: One 2011 report said that 78 percent of companies offer reduced workload flexibility to at least 1 percent of employees, but just 16 percent offer reduced workload flexibility to at least 51 percent of employees. Among the jobs most closely associated with telecommuting and other flexible options are technology occupations and other “knowledge work”—where employees might just need a computer and an Internet connection to do their jobs.

That’s why it was a shock when Yahoo’s new CEO pulled the plug on working from home at the Internet giant. Mayer’s decision to do so earlier this year prompted much discussion, partly because she became a new mother at about the same time she was shutting down a program valued by advocates of women in the workplace. Commentary about Mayer’s move also suggested that Yahoo employees working at home were not working very hard, and that Mayer needed to shake things up amid stiff competition from the likes of Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.

A Yahoo spokeswoman told Workforce that the company doesn’t discuss internal matters, but she said the move was not meant to be a sweeping condemnation of flexible work. “This is about what is right for Yahoo, right now,” the spokeswoman said.

A similar story unfolded at Best Buy. For close to a decade, the electronics retailer conducted one of the most radical experiments in alternative work arrangements. Its Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, allowed employees at its corporate headquarters in Minneapolis to set their hours and place of work as long as they accomplished their job goals. But soon after Yahoo cut back on telecommuting, Best Buy’s CEO announced the end of ROWE.

Best Buy spokesman Jon Sandler says the program had devolved to the point where managers had a hard time working with their direct reports. “It became a right, not a privilege,” he says.

In addition, Sandler says, “We didn’t end flexibility; you just have to ask your manager.”

These explanations rankle Jody Thompson, who co-developed the ROWE program at Best Buy and later co-founded CultureRx, a consulting firm that promotes the ROWE approach. Thompson hasn’t worked directly with Best Buy since 2007, and says turnover among the company’s executive ranks led to less support for the results-first philosophy. She says focusing on the term “flexibility” is misguided, because that means concentrating on workers’ schedules rather than their achievements.

“We’re talking about the wrong thing,” Thompson says. Demanding face time from employees is typically a sign that supervisors are unable to lead effectively, she argues. “They don’t know how to manage performance, so they manage people’s time.”

Ravin Jesuthasan, global practice leader at consulting firm Towers Watson & Co., makes a similar point. For telecommuting and other flexible work programs to work, managers must be prepared to have hard conversations with their direct reports. But companies often have simply written work-at-home rules without training their supervisors properly. “It’s much easier to push a policy than to enable and equip managers to make better decisions about talent,” he says.

Jesuthasan also says there are some jobs where telecommuting or virtual arrangements aren’t optimal. Innovation-related work tends to happen best with plenty of face-to-face encounters, he says. Yahoo’s Mayer said as much in an April speech. “People are more productive when they’re alone,” she said, according to Fortune. “But they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.”

It’s a point borne out by hotbeds of creativity such as animation studio Pixar, where Steve Jobs deliberately designed the headquarters to foster impromptu encounters among employees. Increasingly, companies are coming to see the limits of virtual teamwork. It’s one of the factors behind a nascent movement to “reshore” more jobs in America rather than send as much work as possible to lower-wage nations.

To Jesuthasan, the Yahoo and Best Buy moves are prompting healthy reflection on virtual work. “We went headlong into it in a one-size-fits-all way,” he says. “We’re learning that one size does not fit all.”

One problem with flexible work programs is that they’ve been framed as an employment benefit, meaning everyone should be covered, Yost says. The better approach, she says, is for flexibility to be woven together with business aims. These could be saving money on office space, making the business more resilient in the faces of natural disasters or attracting talent more effectively. Even then, flexibility efforts generally require education for both managers and employees, Yost says. And this means more than simple time management, she says. For flex work to work well, employees must continually reflect on professional and life priorities and communicate effectively with managers and peers, she says.

“It falls apart because the individual employees don’t necessarily know how to handle it themselves,” Yost says. “It’s the modern skill set we all need but no one has.”