A flexible work program sounds great, doesn’t it? In reality, it is hard to pull off. I consider my company to be a “learning lab” and the team openly talks about what that means. On the surface, I love the idea of flexibility. In fact, flexibility is one of the tenets I’ve built my company on.
Yet as a small business owner, I’ve learned that the devil is in the details.
All of my talent wants flexibility as well. But flexibility is one of those words like “Montessori,” which has many interpretations. Therefore it is important to define it, to screen and ensure others are interpreting it like you, and to measure how effective the flexibility policies are.
You can have flexibility with location. Or with time of day worked. Or days of the week worked.
However, the entire reason for flexibility is to be able to have more time. For example, when my twins were born at 33 weeks, I knew we would have some health challenges. As I was temperature checked every morning, I realized that the next two years were going to be rough. And I wanted to protect my family as much as possible. Putting them into a large group childcare setting wouldn’t work. Fortunately, my husband worked east coast market hours, meaning we could each have a work “shift” and a childcare “shift.” It also meant I needed someone great who would be willing to give me interesting work. When a flexible work program is done right, it gives companies access to high-caliber talent that is either out of the labor market or underemployed. But when flexibility is executed poorly, you can see poor quality work or floundering employees.
Creating a Flexible Work Program
So how can you create a flexible work environment that activates strategic talent and adds to the company’s growth? There are five metrics leaders can start tracking:
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- Results: Are the outcomes being created that you and your customer need? For us, we look at repeat business and number of referrals.
- Community: Does the team feel connected? It can be hard to build community when offering flexibility. This was a struggle for my team as we had people in multiple time zones and with different hour limitations. Because we have a community metric we track and “pulse” on a monthly basis, we could try different things. Ultimately, we landed on having IM up so we could chat during the day, leveraging video calls whenever possible, and having a weekly call. This year we want to try having at least one in-person retreat. By having a metric we are tracking, we’ll know if the actions are having an impact.
- Churn: What is the turnover in the first 30 or 90 days? If this number is high or increasing then there is room for improvement in how you are recruiting, explaining, or onboarding people into flexible roles. When I first started, I noticed my 90 day turnover was higher than what I wanted. Part of this was my need to define what flexibility was and wasn’t. I had a few folks who said it wasn’t motivating working from home or they didn’t know where to start—and given they could work whenever they wanted to, they started procrastinating. During the interview process, I screen for past successes working in a flexible environment.
- Work-Life Integration: Do individuals feel they have meaningful work and a sustainable lifestyle outside of work? This varies. I have some people who only want to work five to 10 hours per week while kids are napping or sleeping. Others want 50 hours, but it is most important that they do preschool pick up and drop off. Asking about sustainability determines if the current model is working for the person with his or her current goals.
- Retention: Look at this at a granular level. Are you keeping top performers? In particular, take a look at new parents and women as they are more likely to want the flexibility.
Some of the leaders we work with worry that they don’t have the right metric. And they might not. But the key is to start defining and measuring success. Once you start measuring and tracking something then you can always change the metrics if what you are reviewing isn’t actionable or helpful.
Reviewing the Metrics
Metrics don’t tell the whole story; rather the data highlights hot spots and places where things are going extremely well or where there are challenges. We see some leaders focus on just the data and then speculate about what is going on. For example, the work-life balance metric may decrease during the holiday season if you are a retailer. Some of this is to be expected. What the best leaders do is segment out the metrics and review the extremes. The highest performing group: What is that leader doing? Is there something in that area that could be translated and shared with other parts of the organization? Likewise for the lowest scoring groups—what is happening there? Talk to the leader of the group.
A regular pulse and review of the metrics gives you a chance to remind people what is important. It creates a forum for people to come together, look at facts, and have a conversation. Is flexibility a core value for your organization? For my organization, regular reviews of our flexibility metrics give me time to remind everyone what flexibility means, why we offer it, and ask how we could leverage flexibility to deliver even better work to our customers.
And what if you’re an employee working in a flexible model? Note that there may be some unconscious bias against you. Many companies, especially more traditional ones, don’t realize that legitimate jobs can be done remotely. Keep record of your achievements. Build in regular time to track the three to four achievements you are most proud of. You may even want to build a document that quantifies the value you’ve created or the impact you’ve had. Do excellent work and then own and be proud of the amount of value you were able to deliver, especially in a flexible environment.
Flexible work programs are an important tool for progressive companies. Both individuals working in a flexible company and leaders empowering flexible working environments need to be accountable for delivering great work. By tracking the impact of flexible work programs, thoughtful leaders can ensure they are having bottom line impact as well.
Readers, are you looking to implement a flexible work program? Share you story with us below!
Christy Johnson is the CEO of ArtemisConnection, a consultancy that creates holistic talent solutions based on data and using design-based thinking. She sees her company as a learning lab for the best consultants to lead high level strategic work AND have a life. Her toddler twins, daughter, and husband hold her accountable for work-life integration.
Photo credit: iStockphoto.com
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