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In this
guest article, Mark Dixon, CEO and founder
of Regus plc, looks at the rise of the
flexible worker, and what it means for the
future of work organisation. We are
in the throes of a working revolution that
is changing the way organisations function,
the way people live, and the way we relate
to our environment. Increasingly, people
aren’t going to work; work is coming to
them. |
Technology, of course, has been the catalyst.
When it is possible to compare ideas and exchange
documents electronically, perform work remotely and
stay in touch by mobile telephone, there is no
longer the same need to gather in one place. The old
hierarchies are breaking down, and the old workplace
routines are no longer relevant.
An unstoppable trend
More and more people are choosing to work away
from the traditional office – for example around 24
million today in the US work from home, that’s 16
per cent of total employment. The last published
figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed
the number of homeworkers rising from 19.8m to 20.7m
from 2001 to 2004, a 5 per cent increase. Even more
revealing is the fact that 99% of these people are
teleworkers – those who use computers and
telecommunications to work.
Very few people actually want to work from home
all the time. For obvious reasons, it suits young
mothers, but others feel isolated at home, lacking
stimulation or competing with their families for
space and attention. So although much has been
written about the rise of homeworking – and at Regus
we are acutely aware that many of our 500,000
customers work from home at least part of the time –
it is the new worker’s flexibility that is most
striking. Certainly, we work from home; but we also
work on the move. In fact people can work just about
anywhere, and this is what is changing the way we
organise our lives.
What makes this such an unstoppable trend is that
it is at the heart of entrepreneurial activity all
over the world. We have seen how the service sector
has eclipsed traditional industry in just a few
decades. Now we are seeing how the spread of
flexible working is changing the nature of
entrepreneurship, which powers the new economy and
helps us decide how we want to live. It is no
coincidence that flexible workers are far more
environmentally conscious than their predecessors,
and conduct their lives in much more sustainable
ways, with less commuting, less pollution and more
recycling of resources that are available closer to
home.
The 'Free Agent' model
Amazingly, it is now exactly a decade since
Daniel Pink, former speech writer to Al Gore, wrote
his book Free Agent Nation, in which he contrasted
the emerging lifestyle of the flexible worker with
that of the traditional ‘organisation man’ of the
late 20th century. Pink was one of the first to
consider the ways that such lone wolves would have
to be supported in order to link up with business
and society – meeting-places and networks both
physical and virtual.
But whereas Pink was concentrating on
self-employed people, today’s flexible worker is
just as likely to be employed, albeit in a way that
is very different from the traditional
employer/employee relationship. The difference today
is that the power belongs not with the organisation
or employer, but with the flexible workers
themselves.
Today’s enlightened employers recognise this
power shift, and are ready to change their
organisational models so that they can attract the
best and brightest people to work for them. IBM
allow nearly 40 per cent of their workforce to work
from home if they want to and KPMG offer the same
option to about a third of their 5,000 workers in
the UK.
Productivity and diversity
One of flexible working’s greatest success
stories is the US airline JetBlue which employs 1000
people working from home or on the move, taking more
than 10 million calls a year. Since moving away from
call centres, management noticed a 25 per cent
increase in productivity with only a 4 per cent
employee turnover. Stephen Loynd of the IBC
estimates that the cost to train someone to work in
a call centre is $31, compared with $21 to train
them to work from home.
Women, not surprisingly, have already benefited
enormously from the rise of flexible working, and
will make their presence increasingly felt. At Regus,
we undertook a detailed study just a month ago which
showed that nearly half the global business
population was expecting to hire mothers to work
part-time over the next two years. In India, no
fewer than 64 per cent of employers expect to hire
mothers returning to work after the birth of
children.
Flexible working doesn’t only favour women. It
favours all those who might find it difficult to
report to a certain place of work five days a week –
parents, carers, or people with disabilities, many
of whom have developed advanced skills in
teleworking that they have only recently been able
to deploy to full effect. The new workforce is
increasingly diverse, and all the better for it.
Physical and virtual meeting places in the new
world of work
As I have already intimated, flexible working, or
working from home, is not necessarily easy. It may
be more convenient, but it may also be tedious,
repetitive and alienating. There are plenty of
successful entrepreneurs who will readily confess to
having suffered from a form of log-cabin madness as
they wrestled with their business models, plans and
great ideas from the solitude of their garden sheds.
Increasingly, employers, planners and governments
alike are exploring not only the possibilities of
electronic social networking but also of
meeting-places, coffee-shops and business hubs,
places that can replicate the corridor, the
water-cooler and the office pub where people
traditionally meet to share ideas, complain,
sympathise and get to know each other. We may be
searching for the modern equivalent of the Roman
forum, and this is an area where Regus is doing
pioneering work in setting up business hubs in
formerly residential areas.
There are other pressing issues for
policy-makers, such as the growing need to design
and build homes for work as well as accommodation.
The middle classes can afford to redesign their
living spaces, but it is in areas of high
unemployment where people most need to find
opportunities to work from home. Yet some social
landlords still use tenancy agreements that
specifically bar use of the property for business
purposes.
In these and many other ways, flexible working is
proving to be increasingly popular, sustainable,
inevitable, and desirable. In subsequent articles, I
look forward to exploring related issues such as
working hours, travel and time, the management of
the new workforce, collaboration, carbon footprints,
work and reward, the redesign of homes and the
development of public policy.
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