Talking flexibility: Professional Mums founder Kate Mills, Consult Australia CEO Megan Motto, BDO Chair Helen Argiris and Angela Priestley
Trust is an issue that keeps coming up when it comes to workplace flexibility, particularly in ‘allowing’ employees to work from home.
There’s always the concern from managers that staff might ‘slack off’, that the distractions available outside of an office will lead them astray into unproductive, time-wasting territory.
These are legitimate concerns – especially if employees don’t have particular tasks that need to be completed within a certain, known and communicated timeframe.
But if you’re concerned about your staff being unable to focus and complete what’s required at home, then you should also be concerned about what they’re doing in the office. In fact, you may want to rethink why your hired them. And if you should give them access to the company credit card, or even the key to the stationary cupboard.
They either can’t be trusted, or you need to better communicate just what they’re there for.
Yesterday, I shared a panel with BDO chair Helen Argiris and Consult Australia CEO Megan Motto to discuss workplace flexibility with Kate Mills and ProfessionalMums.net. Trust and communication came up as two important facets of making workplace flexibility work. Both Argiris and Motto said it’s important to be able to have “difficult and confronting conversations” with staff around outputs, and to put structure around your continued communications.
Trust underpins every successful relationship, including those between an employer and its employees — it’s a manager whose responsibility it is to manage such relationships. As we discussed yesterday, not all managers are good managers — indeed, too often in professional services firms the great ‘doers’ of the firms get promoted to leadership, despite not necessarily having the skills or capabilities to successfully carry out such roles, and rarely with much leadership training along the way.
Also yesterday, WGEA director Libby Lyons delivered the Agency’s latest gender equality data at the National Press Club, offering findings on the still too few number of women in leadership, as well as the fact women are working part time at four times the rate of men. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers if Australia should have a conversation about longer school hours to better accommodate working parents, as is currently being discussed in the United States, Lyons (a former teacher) said kids are in school long enough.
Instead, she suggested we need to rethink how we’re providing flexibility to workers. “We are so focused in Australia on being in the office for long hours, we absolutely have to bust that,” she said. “Working for long hours in the office doesn’t mean you’re more productive… We have to start focusing on outcomes.”
She noted how employers like Mirvac are moving into new office spaces with 70% of the number of desks compared to the number of employees – assuming that at least a third of them will be out of the office on any given day.
“If we are providing people with the opportunity to work and to meet their outcomes in a way that suits their lifestyle, then we are creating an employee who is happy, who enjoys their work, and who as a result will be more productive.”
We’re also creating employees who feel respected and valued.
Most employees are adults and genuinely want to do the right thing at work. Not all can be trusted, but that’s why robust recruitment and reference-checking processes should be in place during the hiring process. If employees know exactly what’s required of them and you still can’t trust them to get it done flexibly and/or at home, then why would you trust them to do it in the office?
