This is the first week in the “A to Z” series explaining WiseWork. It’s all laid out in the “Why WiseWork” guide available on this site. Each week we will be taking a letter of the alphabet and looking at the word it represents. This week it’s A for Absence. When I chose ‘absence’ as the topic I was aware that introducing remote and flexible working schemes are known to reduce absenteeism. So it seemed obvious that one of the…
It’s a general assumption that people who are engaged in their work and have meaningful jobs are likely to be the most productive. But there is very little research that proves this. There is no common measure of productivity between employers so comparison is difficult. At national level there is an economic measure of output per employee hour worked and this is often used to show that the UK is well down the league table. But the UK economy seems…
Yet another survey has shown that flexible workers are more effective than those working normal office hours. Research commissioned by the AAT (Association of Accounting Technicians) looked at the productivity of a group of workers who set their own hours or working location against a group of those who are not doing so. Flexible workers said they felt they worked effectively for more of a typical working day than those working a traditional ‘nine-to-five’. A quarter said they work longer…
Almost every day we hear of yet another survey that ‘proves’ people are more productive when they are working from home, only to see other surveys that favour the office. It’s worth looking a bit closer at who is sponsoring or running the ‘research’ and how objective it really is. Recently, a survey of 5,500 ‘respondents’ concluded that 66% of professionals think they would be more productive working remotely rather than in a traditional office. Just 7% chose ‘The office…
The UK remains consistently near the top of the working hours league and well down the productivity table. Maybe there is a connection? A recent survey from Morgan McKinley showed that 84% of respondents work beyond their contracted hours. And it’s not just the odd extra hour. 27% work between 6 and 9 hours more per week and a further 31% work 10 hours or more over their official working time. The survey disproves the theory that these are all…
The Work Foundation have just produced a fascinating report on mobile working. They have trawled through a wide range of existing literature and surveyed over 500 managers across the UK to build up a picture of the extent of mobile working today and the way it is headed over the next few years. Their survey showed that mobile working was the norm by 2014 for over one third of the individual respondents and over one third of the organisations they…
The subject of productivity has been in the news recently. The government is trying to improve the UK’s ranking against other countries and struggling to work out how to do it. Having a flexible labour market should help but it hasn’t worked too well so far. This could be because managers still don’t know how to transform agile working from an employee benefit into a business strategy. Moving from a low skill, low wage economy to the opposite certainly sounds…