Flexible working goes beyond the accepted concept of working from home. It offers your employees the freedom to work from anywhere, on any device of their choice! It is a way of working that considers your employee’s personal needs and gives them the freedom to work from home to a certain degree. The term refers to a non-traditional working arrangement wherein the employee can choose a flexible start and finish time, unlike a conventional nine-to-five work schedule.
Flexible work could mean flexible working hours or any permutation and combination of remote and hybrid work put together. Agreed, multiple lockdowns during the pandemic forced companies worldwide to adopt remote work. But having experienced the benefits of remote work, especially in terms of increased productivity, companies have decided to accept a certain degree of remote work post covid to keep their dispersed employees happy while ensuring improved bottom lines.
Benefits of Flexible Working
Flexible working brings to the table multiple benefits both to the employee and the employer. These include:
- A better work-life balance for the employee
- Lowers levels of absence
- Decreases stress levels
- Employees are motivated to be more productive
- Reduces overhead expenses like rent, utilities
- Increases employee engagement
- Betters employer-employee relationship
- Fosters employee retention
Flexible working hours and remote work have thus become the new normal in an anywhere work scenario.
Read more: Why Does Employee Well-being Matter in a Hybrid Work Model?
How Flexible Working Contributes to Company Efficiency?
- Workplace flexibility can be leveraged to increase employee engagement and productivity, thus improving overall company efficiency.
- Flexibility at work leads to increased happiness of your employees, thus motivating them to work harder to meet goals.
- Leverage technology to enable seamless communication and collaboration across geographies.
- Increases the agility of your company in general and your workforce in particular, thus catering to improved customer service and increased customer loyalty.
- Reduces attrition levels, a fact that is likely to attract future talent.
A flexible work culture calls for accepting ‘flexibility’ as an essential strategic tool for managing your business and integrating it with all your business systems and processes. There has been a paradigm shift in how companies let their employees work, post Covid-19. The McKinsey-Ipsos study “The American Opportunity Survey” reports that 58% of the 25000 employed Americans surveyed confirm having the option to work full or part of the week from the privacy of their homes. 35% of the respondents of the same study say that they can work from home full time, and another 23% confirm that they can work from home one to four days a week. Stats indicate that remote and hybrid work is here to stay. Both employers and employees have realized the fact that flexible work serves to help the latter find a better work-life balance.
The ongoing changes in the realm of work have changed employee expectations of work. Hybrid work would be an excellent opportunity for your geographically diverse teams to better their career prospects. Gartner’s “Future of Work Trends Post Covid-19,” says hybrid work is all set to become mainstream.
Future of Work
- The future of work and the workplace involves embracing digital culture and tools to support flexible work. Adopting smart digital workplace solutions help companies break silos and give transparency in their internal communications. This motivates your employees to work towards realizing the organizational mission and vision better and more efficiently. You need the backup of smart communication and collaboration tools to implement flexible work successfully. Your company needs the right technical capabilities to support your ‘anywhere workforce’ for the successful implementation of flexible work.
- As employee expectations of working remotely have changed, companies would be designing work around employee-driven flexible schedules to create a human-centric model and culture to promote a healthy hybrid environment.
- Companies must develop processes and infrastructure that help upskill their current workforce and enable them to move to higher roles, optimize their present manpower and save money in the event.
- Employers must ensure well-being as a critical part of their Employee Value Proposition (EVP) to attract and retain talent.
- Companies will leverage technologies to ensure their hybrid employees remain connected to their organizational culture. Also, investments are to be made in talent processes to help expand employee networks.
- Good manager-employee relationships pave the way for excellent employee experiences. Managers would require the support of proper tools to develop proactive relationships with their diverse teams.
- Data analytics is essential to assess employee engagement and well-being to enrich employee experiences. Smart digital workplace solutions come with tools to track employee productivity as well.
Read more: 6 Tips To Guarantee Data Security in a Digital Workplace
How Can a Smart Digital Workplace Solution like InfinCE render Your Business Futuristic
InfinCE is a modern workplace solution powered by cloud technologies and smart tools. It can unify your data, simplify your business processes, and enable seamless communication among your teams to deliver, no matter which corner of the earth they work from! The feature-rich digital platform brings to the table a multitude of benefits to ease your business operations and make your company future-ready in the ever-evolving digital ecosystem. Here is how InfinCE can be your best buddy to shore up your digital endeavors:
- InfinCE is purpose-built to enable real-time collaboration through varied collaboration apps to support remote and hybrid work. The platform comes with an array of collaboration tools like employee directory, business phone, live chat, individual and group audio and video calls, etc., to help your teams work better and faster.
- It can simplify data analytics by building custom dashboards to suit your business needs. Better access to data and improved transparency help increase employee productivity.
- Enables effective communication through online office tools, secure file sharing, email, and task manager.
- Its curated application marketplace comes with several open-source and commercial business apps, allowing you to choose the right tools that suit your line of business, no matter which industry you represent.
- It allows you to easily manage your information assets and scale efficiently as your business needs change.
- You can centrally control your IT assets through a single login.
- It has stringent access controls to safeguard your critical data.
- Allows your employees to access your business management software from anywhere on any device of their choice.
- InfinCE is your one-stop solution for all your IT infrastructure needs.
- And what’s more, InfinCE mobile app allows you to access your data on its intuitive Android/IOS apps to deliver an engaging experience to your mobile workforce!
InfinCE is a smart, futuristic digital platform equipped with everything you need to ease your business operations and manage your mobile and diverse workforce efficiently as you scale up. Get in touch with our experts to know more, or sign up for a live demo.