The move to flexible working patterns - home working, hot desking from a number of locations, part time working, compressed hours - is a rapidly increasing trend in many organisations in both the public and private sectors.
Our client is part of central government based in the regions. Their drivers for moving to a flexible working environment are based on increasing staff retention, and promoting family friendly work policies. Also, a change of office location meant that offering flexible working patterns would help to maintain and develop productivity.
There are of course a number of challenges for managers who are used to leading and managing in an office based environment:
How do you manage people you cannot see?
What support and coaching will staff need?
How do you maintain the sense of "team" when it is virtual for much of the time?
How does the manager balance the need to manage the operation and deliver against objectives, maintaining the team, and managing remotely based individuals?
What issues can remote working cause, and how are they addressed?
We have been working with the client for twelve months, with two groups of managers.
They were selected on the basis that their teams were the ones moving most rapidly to flexible working.
What has been our approach?
Develop a programme consisting of some self study and short duration half day practically based workshops
Creating a theme of the "4XC" - culture, how to maintain it, consistency, in terms of how people are managed in this new environment, communication, in the context of not same time same place, and conflict, how to manage conflicts caused by remote working
Practically based, with managers working on live plans for communication channels, working with their teams on a remote working team code, and what coaching will be needed
The overall message is that managing in a flexible working environment does not change the role or the skills required of managers. What does change is the context and the environment.
Our role has been to facilitate workshops and to work with the managers on a group and individual basis in supporting them in what is a change process.
