The Flexibility Blog

The President endorses Telework - in Iran

2012-01-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

2011 was an unusual year for me in all kinds of ways. But one thing I could never have predicted was that I would share a platform with President Ahmadinejad of Iran, talking about telework.

I'm not sure the President knew I was there, however. When I say 'share a platform', I have to say that my presence in the auditorium was virtual. My presentation was remote via Microsoft Lync, so it was a 'walk the talk' kind of occasion for someone who advocates remote working and using technology to save the planet and so forth.

President Ahmadinejad's address was on the topic 'Telework - a Necessity not an Option'. And I have to say that whatever your views about politics and sanctions and everything, it is actually really good to see the leadership of a nation get behind the need to modernise the way government works. Expert after expert says that unless the top level of an organisation gets behind the programme, change will always be an uphill battle.

I was able to capture this image from a camera in the wings. Here is the President of Iran exhorting senior civil servants to get moving on implementing telework, and outlining the benefits of doing so.

And for a country like Iran, there are many challenges too, not least the lack of a comprehensive broadband infrastructure.

I went on to run workshops over three days for managers, employees and for policymakers. And while they couldn't be as interactive as if I had been there in person, these workshops were fascinating to do. We had hours of Q&A from the delegates - and some very challenging questions too. Like 'Hadn't telework failed in the UK if so few people in the government were doing it full time?'

What strikes me most is how similar were many of the concerns to people anywhere before remote working is introduced. Issues like isolation, career progression, information security, people shirking, applicability to different sectors, etc.

There were some differences too in some of the concerns. Unlike most Western countries now that have seen extensive privatisation, the government sector is seen as a key direct provider of jobs in many sectors of the economy. And there were undercurrents of concern and the occasional direct question about whether some of the efficiency benefits and having fewer properties would lead to the loss of lower skill jobs that many people depend on.

One significant difference in outlook that came up again and again, though, was an apparent expectation that Telework is or should be a kind of complete and regulated system that is introduced as a well-defined method of work. Our approach over here has very much been one of uneven progress, and in government an ad hoc and multispeed approach.

I guess there are pros and cons to this approach. Over here we could certainly have done with being a bit more coordinated and coherent, rther than every public sector body doing its own thing. The Iranian Telework Regulations, to some extent like the Telework Enhancement Act in the USA, do provide a coherent framework for the development of telework/homeworking for public sector workers. There is an outline of the benefits, and a duty set on each agency of government to define what they are trying to achieve, set targets, measure impacts, train managers and employees and monitor welfare.

All that is exemplary. At the same time, I always get a little worried about viewing Telework (with a capital T) as a kind of special and separate system of working. Basically, it's doing what you normally do, only having the capability of doing it somewhere else. Somewhere that is more effective for the business and convenient for the employee. The risk is in making it all too complicated, or having too many hoops to jump through so that it starts to seem like you have a mountain to climb.

And this is particularly so in developing countries with patchy infrastructure. Back in the early 1990s, when Flexibility began, we started working from home with dial-up modems and with (so it would seem now) wind-up computers that would crash every hour or two, and a pile of floppy disks to keep our data on. The Internet was barely up and running then, and it was a case of the World Wide What? And if you had a mobile phone, it was best if you had staff to carry it. Portable computing devices? Even mobile phones were barely portable. And many aspects of business and political culture were hostile to the whole notion of flexible working.

But we did it. And these were useful, learning, developmental experiences. And still worth doing at the time in terms of getting the work done.

The key question for Iranian civil servants perhaps is around the pace of change. How far can they go in implementing telework if their infrastructure isn't up to it and, as some delegates indicated, many managers manage in quite traditional ways?

Well, I hope they don't wait for perfect systems to develop, and just move on fast in areas where it is possible to do so. Lessons will be learnt, and the best implementations will be imitated.

And the infrastructure will develop. It is a country with a very young and well educated population who are creating a demand for good quality infrastructure and services. And when it comes they can skip out the intermediate stages we have been going through, perhaps.

Certainly a country to watch, and we have to wish them well with this aspect of modernising government.

Time on the road could be time spent with you

2011-11-15T02:22:00.001-08:00

It's good to see the Trades Union Congress (TUC) here in the UK stepping up their support for flexible working.

As part of their support for 'Commute Smart Week', the TUC have published an analysis of government figures on commuting, and found that people working full-time spend on average 219 hours per year commuting. That's equivalent to an extra 5 working weeks per year.
(www.tuc.org.uk/workplace/tuc-20275-f0.cfm)

They also found that women commute less, and people with longer journeys generally have higher-paid jobs. (Details in our Flexibility article)

It may be stating the obvious - but the point is what to do about it

There is nothing new in these findings, of course. Women overall commute less because part-time work is much more common amongst women. Neither women nor men will travel so far for part-time work, as it generally pays less. So it's not really to do with gender directly.

The two findings reflect the same thing - people will travel further for more money. It's the cost/reward trade-off that we all make when we look at where to work in relation to where to live.

One of the things we've always found in our smart working surveys in companies is that people with longer journeys are

already more likely to work from home when they can, and
are more likely to want to work from home or change their time of travelling

... than those who live closer to work. Kind of logical, isn't it?

This also means that those who are the first to start working from home are usually managers and professionals. It's partly because they can, but also because they have the biggest incentive in terms of savings - savings of both time and money.

All those hours spent commuting - probably alone in the car, or on public transport in the company of strangers - can now be spent in a more rewarding way. Either in person with family, or virtually interacting with work and work colleagues. Or dividing the time between the two.

And with fuel prices as they are, it's certainly time for companies and the government to do everything in their power to enable flexible working for all.

Some challenges here for the Unions

The TUC is taking the right approach here, calling for more flexible working. But there are challenges for them too.

Unions represent less than a quarter of the workforce - and mostly those on lower pay, mostly in the public sector. For those on lower pay, part-time work is the most common form of 'flexible' work. While their managers start to work from home or have greater choice over their working hours, low paid workers are not trusted to do the same.

Of course many jobs on the front line in manufacturing and retail, for example, cannot be done from home. But other forms of flexibility may be relevant. And for clerical workers, coming into an office is more to do with habit and archaic processes than necessity.

The challenge is how to make flexibility the norm for all workers at all levels, and not just the preserve of the manager and 'knowledge worker' who are empowered to make choices not available to others.

2.5 million looking for a job in the UK - while a billion Chinese look to start a business

2011-10-21T02:25:00.000-07:00

I spent the summer in China with the family - combining holiday, family visit and work. Down in hot, humid sub-tropical Hainan, China's southernmost province. I was still able to work (virtually) in the UK, though there were times when this tested my remote working capability to the limit. Dodgy Internet and an extensive array of exotic and invasive local fauna with anything from four to a thousand legs. Only the dodgy Internet reminded me of Cambridgeshire. But that's another story.

While we were in China there was a steady diet of woeful news about the UK and other Western economies. And then the riots around the UK. This generated a lot of concern amongst Chinese family and friends about whether my family in the UK would be safe, whether it would be safe to go back - and a general mystification as to why it all happened.

The Chinese media went to town on this. The media is far more open and reflective than you might expect. Obviously there are topics to steer clear of, but on business, economics, social affairs and international affairs there's quite a lot of sharp analysis and in-depth discussion. Our soundbite and controversy-driven media could even learn a lesson or two, perhaps.

They interviewed a host of UK analysts and campaigners who always came back to the issue of disaffected youth and the lack of job prospects. Now we find the new unemployment figures show nearly a million 16-24 year-olds unemployed. That's serious - but it also set me thinking ...

What young person would want to spend their life making money for someone else as an employee?

It's a truism that everyone in China wants to do business. The relentless focus on making money, getting the best deal in any situation, can be tiresome for the foreigner. But it translates into an endless scrum of enterprise and ambition that pervades the culture. And not least the way young people look at the world.

Down at street level are small enterprises, often involving all the family. Street after street of small lockup shops or places where the family live over the top. Grandma and grandpa are there to look after young children and help out as needed. Older children come back from school, and are doing their homework in the shop/workshop/studio and helping out as needed. Being part of a family business, then helping to run it or starting their own business is the way to go.

Sitting back and moaning at the government that there's not enough jobs, or not enough training, or that training doesn't lead to jobs - well, who would do that?

Apart from us British, of course.

The new world of work and the spirit of enterprise

So what has all this got to do with the new world of work?

We've got to stop thinking about having job opportunties and start thinking about creating value through our work. That's what enterprise is. And home is at the centre of creating new work. It probably always has been.

Over 60% of startups begin life at home. An idea + energy + motivation + good organisation. The showcase examples lead to a Microsoft, HP, Pizza Hut, Ben & Jerry's. But for most of us it won't - and that's OK. It's about making a living doing something we can engage with.

Home-based businesses, small local businesses, family businesses - this is the way out of the shadow of recession. And there have never been better circumstances to do this. It's not all about 'knowledge workers' working fom home.

It's about people buying and selling over the Internet, as with the burgeoning number of eBay businesses. It's about growing food in your garden and selling it, making things at home, in the garage, or at local cheap premises and selling them. Or it's about developing skills - artistic, musical, technical - and selling yourself online.

Norman Tebbit once famously advised the unemployed in the Thatcher era to follow the example of his dad, who got on his bike and went to look for work in the 1930s depression.

75 years later, the advice should be just the opposite. Get on your bike and go home! Leave the un-enterprising at the Job Centre, where they can wait for a job they will hate to drop into their lap.

Take a tip from the Orient. Buy something. Sell something. Do something. Make money! And it all begins at home.

You called this one right, Vince!

2011-03-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

There has been a surge of criticism aimed at the government for shelving plans to extend the 'right to request' flexible working. It's not only come from others campiagning for more flexible working, but also from the Labour party.

The plans to ditch the extension came out at the start of the week, and were reiterated in today's Budget announcement. Labour leader Ed Miliband fiercely denounced it as an attack on working families.

I should be agreeing with him, shouldn't I?

I don't. And here's why.

1) In the process, the government has restated its commitment to extending the right to request to all workers - which we have always argued is the right approach.

The planned extension was just tinkering at the edges anyway, a timid delaying measure intended to avoid more substantial change. Changing eligibility from parents with children under 17 to parents of children under 18 was really going to make very little difference, and it was getting some businesses into a bit of a tizz about bureaucracy.

So why tinker? Just go straight for the real thing!

2) I've always thought the 'right to request' for parents - and not others - was inherently discriminatory. Positive discrimination, perhaps, but still hard to justify. You can end up with situations where people are doing exactly the same job, but only parents (one third of the workforce) are allowed to work flexibly. This can't be right.

3) It's funny how people can become fixated on a process, no matter how odd that process is when you stand back and look at it. I don't really buy into the 'right to request' concept, when it comes down to it.

Apart from being (at the moment) discriminatory, it also invites a reactive, ad hoc, case-by-case approach to implementing flexible working - rather than a proactive and strategic one.

So, rather than carp at ditching a minor adjustment, I think we should them give them 2 cheers for planning to extend the right to all workers.

When good flexible working goes bad ...

2010-01-22T04:56:00.000-08:00

With case studies of flexible work, we hear the good news. But I've come across several examples of flexible working programmes that have gone into decline, or reverse. Here are some of the reasons why:

New Chief Executive, cut from traditional cloth, doesn't like people being out of sight, and sets up a review. Momentum leaves the flexible work programme, as managers all the way down the line don't want to proceed with something that may end up being a waste of time and could reflect badly on them.
Reorganisation. Faced with pressures on the business, the deck-chair re-arrangers come to the fore. They probably engage one of the big consultancies to draw new organisation charts. Teams successfully working flexibly are broken up and put into departments which work in the old ways. Desk-sharing comes a cropper as the numbers don't work any more, and no one has thought about this as part of the old-fashioned restructuring.
Downsizing. When flexible working was introduced, so was desk-sharing in the office. 25 desks for 35 people was thought to be quite radical. But now there are only 24 people in the team, and everyone is reverting back to the old 1:1 and sitting at the same desk every day.
Top team sabotage. After the introduction of smart working, which they have supported, the executive management team decide they don't go for all this togetherness. Our work is confidential. It's different. We're special.
Meeting rooms are re-colonised as private offices - and it's a downward path from here as staff get the message.

What's the message here? I guess it's that introducing flexible working is a continuing journey. And sometimes the ground is shifting under your feet, and it's not safe to stand - you'll be sliding back or falling down a big hole.

So what's the answer? The organisation culture needs to change so that the principles of smart/flexible work are embedded. Whenever changes are proposed, the impacts on working practices become a central consideration.

And the culture needs to have taken root so that neither the top team or the new broom will find it so easy to sweep out the new and bring in the old.

When the snowman brings the snow ...

2010-01-06T02:10:00.000-08:00

Well here in north Cambridgeshire we've had the most snow since 1963 - and I can actually remember 1963, as it happens.

We don't deal with snow well here - friends from Canada, Sweden etc fall around laughing watching our wall-to-wall news coverage of a few centimetres of snow. But some time ago we took the collective if unconscious decision that it wasn't worth it economically to prepare properly for the limited disruption we get every few years.

That's fine - except that in the world of work we tend to have rules that say, whatever the weather you must try to soldier on as normal. Have you had a message from HR or your Chief Executive saying something to the effect of: "We expect staff to make every effort to come in, while taking care in the weather conditions"?

I was half encouraged by seeing a proposed 'bad weather policy' from the TUC which includes the lines:

"If you judge that weather conditions or transport problems make it impossible for you to get to work, you should contact your (insert designated contact head of Department/line manager) as soon as possible to tell them about the problem. Your manager will make a judgement on whether:

- you will be allowed to come in late;

- you will be allowed to work from home; or

- if your job can't be done at home, you will be allowed to stay at home without suffering any loss of pay or annual leave."

While it's good that working from home is seen as potential option, I'm only half encouraged. Because the assumption is that it only applies if it's impossible to get in to work. I'd start by replacing the word 'impossible' with 'inefficient'.

It seems both employers and unions still expect staff to make heroic efforts to get to work. The mindset is "Waste your time, waste our time, risk injury - because if we can't see you, we don't believe you're working"

Only if all else fails does working in the most appropriate place to work effectively come into play.

See TUC policy
Read Flexibility advice

Help! I've been digitally disconnected!

2009-10-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's punishment for my comments about Digital Britain and the mediocrity of our telecoms infrastructure (see last post below). Maybe it's just bad luck. But BT have decided to put me on the wrong side of the 'digital divide'.

What have I done wrong? I've moved to a new home, in a nice new area. And one that's supposedly all hooked up to BT - the monopoly provider here. I'm locked into a contract with them from my previous address. I've paid my rental, and the £122 connection fee, and had the set-up all booked. Should have been plain sailing.

Then a text from BT postponing it for a week. Then a voicemail postponing it - indefinitely!

What's the problem?

Well, it seems BT failed to put in enough capacity to provide services to the several thousand homes being built in this area. They say the landowner won't let them on their land to upgrade.

The landowner, however, says BT have cocked it up big time and want to dig up all the roads that have just been laid, landscaped and signed off for handing over to the local council.

While all this finger-pointing goes on, new residents moving in are being told there is no immediate prospect of a phone line or broadband. One resident has been told it will be at least 3 months. When I talk to BT, they stonewall and say there are confidential issues involved... too confidential to tell paying customers when they might get a phone.

Maybe a little irony here?

I am aware that there is perhaps a little irony here. Both in BT's position in promoting home-based working - and my own in doing likewise. This is the other side of the story here, for sure, and it shows that not everything in the flexibility garden is always rosy.

But it's a serious problem for home-based businesses if they have no broadband. And expensive too, to have calls routed to my mobile, and the long sessions in cafes to use the wi-fi. Being a journalist I have the flexibility to get round some of the problems. But if I was in a buying-and-selling kind of business, the impact could be disastrous.

Digital Britain? When there's not enough capacity to give new homes even a phone line, Digital Britain seems to be just a distant dream! And universal service? I don't know what this means any more.

The myopic vision of Digital Britain

2009-06-19T08:21:00.000-07:00

Britain's much-hyped blueprint for the digital age, Digital Britain, has been taking a pasting in the papers since the publication of the final report this week. And rightly so.

There's been a lot of angry focus on the proposed tax/levy, or in its own words: "small general supplement ... for a Next Generation Fund" (!!) And on the top-slicing of BBC funding to support other content providers. But for me the worst failure is that the report has absolutely no clue about the importance of digital communications to the world of work.

The whole thing is hopelessly muddled. The problem is that Lord Carter has tried to plot a route through the miasma of fudges that make up our broadband and broadcast landscapes. The report has been too receptive to the special pleading of particular interest groups, and proposes some mildly interventionist measures that will do little to make a difference - except inhibit innovation.

The problem is, we don't do infrastructure well in the UK. Go 5 or 6 miles out of any city into a rural area, and your phone signal is likely to drop, and you'll be unable to get broadband. Having targets that are about having coverage for 98% or even 100% of residences will still leave vast tracts of the country that people work in and travel through without coverage. And it will leave many residences with no competition in terms of provider.

And 2 megabits broadband as a standard for universal service is shameful. The kind of consumer and business applications that will come on stream over the next 10 years will be much more bandwidth-hungry - particularly conferencing technologies and 3-D apps.

But the worst aspect of the report, is that it seems to think that telcos, broadcasters and new media companies are the only sectors that have an interest in this field. It's all about delivering content to largely passive consumers, and these are the players.

All businesses need the best available communications infrastructure, and the standard 2 megabit asymmetric connection just isn't it.

People working remotely, small businesses trying to reach new markets, and home-based businesses (41% of all businesses) will benefit from having much faster networks to communicate, to sell across and to deliver digital products. Digital Britain provides a muddled recipe for delaying what is needed for the new world of work.

Skimming the surface of change

2009-05-21T01:36:00.000-07:00

At Flexibility.co.uk we focus on modernising working practices. So it's with a fair amount of frustration we see the lamentable spectacle of overexcited Members of Parliament falling over themselves to champion reform - a very superficial reform of their casual expenses sytem they have exploited until now.

We are witnessing a kind of parody of historical moments like the Self-Denying Ordinances of the Civil War period, or the French Revolution's August 4th when nobles competed to give up (or appear to give up) their feudal rights.

In many ways, the appearance of reform is as bad as having no reform at all. Public cynicism will remain, and taint everyone who is in, or seeks, public office.

What is needed is a 'root and branch' revolution in the way MPs work. We set out a prescription for this in the article MPs - String them up or wire them up?

The whole structure of the way MPs work, where they work, the times they work, and what they do, needs to be thoroughly re-examined. Otherwise we'll just be kidding ourselves that anything has changed.