Partner Article

The surprising truth about flexible working and innovation

Jonathan Kini, head of Enteprise Commercial Marketing at Vodafone UK, looks at the world of flexible working.

The immediate business benefits of flexible working have long been understood. These include greater organisational productivity and efficiency, lower business costs and better staff work-life balance. Indeed an in-depth study recently carried out by the think tank RSA, in partnership with Vodafone, found that British businesses could make productivity and efficiency savings of up to £8.1 billion by optimising their approach to flexible working. However, we are only now beginning to understand some of the wider organisational benefits of these new ways of working. For example, the same research found that there is a very strong link between flexible working and organisational innovation. Around half of the nearly 3000 employers and employees surveyed in the research believe that flexible working contributes to their capacity for innovation.

The traditional workplace has long been associated with norms and rules which encourage conventional thinking and by extension can stifle creativity. This is ironic given that, for many companies, innovation represents the promised land as they look to come up with new solutions to the old problems of a stagnant economy and sluggish growth. The historical command and control hierarchy in many businesses can encourage people to become risk-averse and play by the rules, as they look to progress up the career ladder. What’s more, as far as physical office space goes, wall dividers and grey-coloured carpets don’t exactly scream innovation and creative thinking. One respondent in the RSA research suggested that their work environment was “not conducive to idea generation… rules and norms suppress the creative energy and sap the soul of those that ‘get’ creativity and innovation.” In an economy like our own, where so much value is derived from intellectual property, encouraging the creative process and fostering innovation is critical, and it’s clear that our working environment must support that.

There is now growing evidence that rejecting traditional ways of working and adopting better way of working can help boost innovation. For those who find the physical office space inimical to thinking ‘outside of the box’, the freedom afforded by flexible working can mean unrestricted and unrestrained thinking. In the book Flexible Working by John Stredwick and Steve Ellis, the authors describe the working environments in artists’ and musicians’ studios and question why we don’t replicate these environments for corporate staff who are also expected and to think and work creatively. Workplace flexibility offers staff the opportunity to create an environment free from the constraints of the office, which suits them and allows them to be at their most creative. For Dave Chaplin, Microsoft UK’s Chief Envisioner flexible working means “being mindful of the location that you are going to be able to do the work you have do today, and being really thoughtful about what that is”.

Taking a more flexible approach within the office is also critical when it comes to supporting greater innovation. For example, more flexible organisational structures and individual staff responsibilities can also help stimulate greater creative thinking within companies. The RSA study found that respondents who had experienced high levels of flexible working adoption believed that it contributed to greater innovation. Individual departments and teams within companies who approach problems and tasks internally without soliciting outside help can be guilty of ‘silo thinking’, where they do not challenge conventional thinking and are afraid to introduce new ideas or concepts. Taking a more flexible approach to these tasks, where staff from around the company are encouraged to join the process means different skills and competencies are introduced to help tackle these problems. Supporting these processes by implementing a flexible office space is also critical. This means creating spaces where staff are free to congregate and brainstorm, greater hot-desking allowing for greater movement and freedom, and Wi-Fi and cloud solutions making it easy for staff to work anywhere they wish.

While the immediate business benefits of flexible working like lower rental costs and better work-life balance have been recognised for quite some time, it is becoming clearer that taking a more flexible approach at every level of the business can have new and surprising consequences. At a time where new and creative solutions to old problems are constantly being sought, flexible working can remove the barriers to traditional thinking and outmoded practices, and put companies on the fast track to innovation.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Vodafone UK .