Lockdown restrictions have forced businesses to rethink what flexible work looks like for employees.

Before the pandemic, flexible working had become loosely fused with working from home. Managers would often say that it was impossible to introduce greater flex because it could not be done fairly as customer-facing staff could not work from home, so it cannot be introduced for other colleagues.

Eyes have been opened this year. Many people have been made a success of working remotely, and learnt that flexing when they work, to accommodate responsibilities, has not prevented them from delivering objectives.

Many staff whose roles require them to be physically present in their workplace have also used flexible working during the crisis, as teams have had to learn to flex working hours and patterns to remain safe and meet social distancing guidelines. 

Where does that leave Manager who worry about fairness? The starting point is that fair flexibility does not mean that everyone must have access to the same kinds of flexible working. What is flexible for an office worker will not be the same as flexibility for colleagues on the shop floor. However, both will value the Manager’s trust and confidence, and perform better, when they are each in their different ways able to exercise more choice and control over how they work.

Lockdown and today’s ongoing restrictions have obliged everyone to be open-minded about work design and delivery. Fresh thinking about fairness and flexibility should embrace and retain this attitude, to build on what we have learned this year. The importance to performance of prizing employee wellbeing, and of committing time and thought to communication within and between teams, has also been reinforced for many organisations.

The foundations have been built for wider, more confident application of flexible working. The key now is to understand that fairness begins with equity of access, supported by clarity about the role and what is possible within it.

Communicating this means establishing the principle that flexibility is available to everyone. It is also being honest that it will differ between roles, teams and business areas, while being equally clear that the process for accessing flexibility and for making requests will be the same for everyone.

The groundwork for successful implementation is to set out the explicit business parameters for each team, and to express clear and understandable objectives and deliverables. It will then be necessary to step back to let teams work out their own protocols, to empower colleagues to agree among themselves what flexible working means in their particular part of the business, and to support each other to make it work for everyone’s benefit. Even within a small team, personal constraints and preferences may mean that different people work differently to achieve the same objectives.

Everyone has to be open-minded in terms of what is workable and what is not workable consistency is key across everything.