Creative Enablers To Achieve and Sustain Flexibility and Work Redesign.

1. What if you have a low level of acceptance of flexibility in work and career pathways?

• Collect baseline data and articulate the business case for flexibility for your organisation;
• Obtain agreement to conduct an initial briefing session or workshop. (The flexibility benefit);
• Ask managers to redesign their own jobs using the work by design tool. The aim here is to enable managers to understand their current operating assumptions and to begin to explore other alternatives;
• Conduct The flexibility benefit workshop. A major outcome of this workshop needs to be action plans for individual managers, the management team and for the organisation;
• Implement the outcomes. This needs to include on-going processes for individuals and for the management team;
• Introduce flexibility creative enablers into management team processes; and
• Implement the Five Factors strategy.

2. What if you want to sustain management commitment and keep the momentum going?

• Use the Five Factors (hyperlink to Developing and Maintaining Management Commitment too) model;
• Conduct a survey on work organisation (hyperlink to Employee Opinion Surveys) to examine the current level of support for flexibility; and
• Design and conduct a work by design pilot.

3. What if you want to obtain line management commitment?

• Consult line management to identify their needs, provide support and coaching as needed;
• Critical to this process is to demonstrate how flexibility can add value to business outcomes;
• Organisations have found that line managers are very responsive to arguments that align flexibility with the achievement of:
  • Higher levels of creativity. Having a diverse and flexible workforce, focusing on flexibility in how, when and where work is conducted usually results in innovative ideas about work design;
  • Customer satisfaction. Often flexibility can enable increased coverage of customer needs; and
  • Retention of talent. For example, recent evidence suggests that younger, highly talented employees are actively seeking higher levels of workplace flexibility.