How can technology support a flexible workforce?

Flex is about giving people choices about their hours, days and place of work. This can lead to higher levels of productivity, employee wellbeing, staff retention and reduced carbon emissions. Gillian Brookes offers tips on how to integrate technology into a flexible workforce.

Employee choice is important. Accessing higher levels of wellbeing leads to people working in a way that helps them live a life they value. This comes from the work of Amartya Sen, who is considered the founding father of wellbeing economics. Without giving people in your workforce access to choices, you won’t have access to the benefits of flex, many of which start with employees gaining a wellbeing benefit, whatever that looks like for them.

Leaders are mindful to avoid entrenching the emerging two-tier workforce. We have around half the workforce able to work from home at least some of the time, and the other half that still has to work in-person only, with no opportunity to work from home. By tweaking the design of a job, it becomes possible to enable that second half of the workforce to do some of their duties from home, if they want to. For example, enabling people to do learning and development or contribute to cross-functional projects. This creates choices for people who would otherwise be missing out entirely and creates a more cohesive workforce, rather than one of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.

Technology And Job Crafting

Technology has a role here, too. When thinking about redesigning a role, we can consider the uniquely human elements of the role alongside the elements that technology can pick up. With advances in artificial intelligence (AI), technology can increasingly take care of the more mundane aspects of jobs, leaving a redesigned role potentially more interesting, more valuable, higher paid and more fulfilling.

The uniquely human work is often about creativity, dealing with complexity and relationship building. This is the heart of our value as humans, relative to technology. People will value the use of technology in this way, if it’s used to enhance the quality of their work and maximise the value they can bring to the organisation. When people have more meaningful work, they are much more likely to feel motivated, perform well and stay with you for longer.

The type of work that’s suited to automation also significantly overlaps with the nature of work that is suited to being fully remote. Process-driven, independent work that is relatively easy for a well-trained person is the type of work better suited to being done remotely. Most of us have some of that type of work, but not exclusively. Over time, these elements of our work will become ideal for automation, eroding the likelihood of significant uptake of fully remote work. Eventually, we might get to the point where technology more closely resembles the in-person experience, but it’s early days there. We have yet to learn how we respond en masse to these tools as a proxy for human connection.

WHAT WORK IS BEST DONE FROM WHERE?

Technology can only enable our work if we are already making good decisions about what work needs to be done at any given time or place. We don’t want to use our time in the office, when we have an opportunity for rare face-toface interactions, to be typing emails or spending all day on video calls.

The box above shows a cheat sheet I often use to help people make better choices about what work to do from where. Working in this way not only drives our need for human connection, but also means we’ll be more productive.

Bad Tech

When it comes to technology and how we best use it, let’s start with what not to do. Some of the worst uses of technology I’ve seen have been in the surveillance culture. Monitoring people’s use of their devices as a proxy for performance and productivity is not what I would recommend. It undermines trust in the employment relationship and has unintended consequences, which far outweigh any benefits. Those unintended consequences manifest in people using technology for the sake of it, even when it’s not what their work requires of them.

Good Tech

The primary focus for most teams right now is how to maintain connection and build cohesion. If we want inclusive and cohesive teams where people trust that meaningful connections are made, regardless of how flexibly they’re working, and that they’re not going to be excluded because of their agreed working arrangements, we need to get this right.

Becoming more comfortable with asynchronous ways of connecting through the good use of technology is critical.

I developed the diagram on the next page to help leaders to think about the use of technology for inclusive, flexible teams. This diagram has an inverse relationship between the quantity of connection and the quality of connection. There is such a limited opportunity to connect in person at the same time and same place, so we need to make sure those opportunities are treated as the highest quality form of connection. To do that, we need to only engage in the kind of work that is best done face-to-face. We can’t shoehorn every piece of information, connection and interaction into that narrow category. I’ve put it at the tip of the triangle because it’s the pinnacle of our quality connection, and we need to use it wisely. Things like planning out our team’s work for the coming quarter or welcoming a new team member are the kinds of activities I’d recommend prioritising for this type of connection.

Because face-to-face will continue to be scarce, we need to become more comfortable with other forms of connecting, with the help of technology. The next level down on the diagram is synchronous but remote, which means the same time, different place. Typically, this means phone calls and video calls. We have seen an explosion in the volume of video calls and we need to reduce our reliance on them.

If that’s the aim, what do we replace them with? This is where we need to get more comfortable with asynchronous voice notes and videos. At the moment, these formats are heavily underused. Using them more gives us an opportunity to connect with the nuance of our humanity through the tone of our voice and the expressions on our faces, but without the need for people to be available at a particular time or place. Many leaders skip this format altogether or only use it sparingly. People are exhausted with video calls and are beginning to avoid engaging in them, so we need more alternatives in our kete.

One leader I worked with recently took this fully on board. She sent her team an informal, self-filmed video with an update from her that she otherwise would have given in a team meeting. The feedback she had from her team was incredibly positive. Those who worked part-time didn’t miss out, as they often had in the past. Others could watch it again to recall the context she’d given in her update, which they’d not been able to do previously.

Because face-to-face will continue to be scarce, we need to become more comfortable with other forms of connecting, with the help of technology.

This leaves us with the last type of connection, which is asynchronous in written form. For most of us, these are emails and the output of our various chat functions. This tends to be the lowest quality form of human connection but one of the easiest to send out, which is why there is so much of it! I expect we will continue to have plenty of emails and other forms of text to read, but wouldn’t it be great if some of it could be replaced by other more engaging forms of connection, like voice notes and videos?

Know Your Workforce

The final tip I have is to know your workforce. Many organisations I work with don’t have an overview of the flex arrangements of their workforce. This means they are making decisions about how to evolve flex, their physical workspace and enabling technology, in the dark. Without knowing the baseline from which to move, it’s impossible to monitor and track your progress. Understanding how people are working, the choices they are making, the impact that’s having and how it varies across the workforce is really important, if you want to keep improving the benefits from flex and the technology that enables (or disables) it.

Gillian Brookes Chartered Member of HRNZ, is the author of Flexperts: Getting the best from flex in a world that’s ever changing. Since 2019, Gillian has specialised as a flexible work consultant and has worked with hundreds of leaders to improve the impact flex has for their business. Her online Flexperts training course is available now. You can find out more at her website www.gillianbrookes.co.nz and connect with her on Linkedin.