Workplaces are catching up to the future. Meet the companies and individuals who are making it happen.
According to new research from Harvard Business School, America is experiencing a new kind of crisis: a “caregiving crisis,” as two researchers are calling it. Of the 75 percent of U.S. workers who have a caregiving responsibility, 28 percent said their caregiving obligations had hurt their career, 32 percent said they left a job because of life-work incompatibility, and 80 percent said their responsibilities at home kept them from doing their best at work. A crisis, indeed.
Intuition gets a lot of hype in modern-day society—from TV crime dramas to Malcolm Gladwell treatises—and to a lot of people, data isn't as exciting. But data doesn't get enough credit, as KPMG International Global Chairman Bill Thomas argues in a new article for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. After KMPG interviewed than 1,300 CEOs from many of the world's largest companies, Thomas and his colleagues found that business leaders are giving their data analyses short shrift.
Open offices foster communication, camaraderie, and—all too often—jealousy. For example, why is Jane Doe leaving at 5 p.m. on the dot when I, John Smith, am stuck working? Well, John, don't assume Jane is a slacker. She just might have different needs based on her life-work compatibility. And no, John, your employer isn't necessarily making an "accommodation" for Jane. Instead, Jane might just have a different flexibility arrangement.
The term "human resources" has long been synonymous with "compliance,” e.g., overseeing payroll, coordinating benefits, approving time off, etc. While these tasks will undoubtedly remain important, the future of HR is going to look a lot different. Over the next few years, we’ll see HR professionals start focusing not just on work parameters, but also on the workers themselves. Simply put, they’ll be putting the human back in human resources.
Single workers can be some of the most hardworking and loyal employees in an organization—and often, they're the most mistreated. In a Quartz essay on the topic, social scientist and Singled Out author Bella DePaulo shares a distressing story from her own work history: A former employer dismissed her salary request by saying that a single person with no children shouldn't be worried about money. DePaulo also cites former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell's assertion that Janet Napolitano was perfect for the job of Secretary of Homeland Security because "she has no family" and "can devote, literally, 19, 20 hours a day to it."
No one wants to point fingers, but if you tried implementing flexibility at your company and didn't enjoy the vast rewards of flex—e.g. boosts to employee morale and engagement, increased productivity, improved health and wellness—then you probably did something wrong. It's the blunt truth: When flexibility fails, it’s usually due to human error, and it's often because the decision-makers—no matter how well intentioned—failed to use data when they created or changed their flexible work policies.
Our research here at Werk has found that 96 percent of the U.S. workforce needs access to flexibility, with the average employee needing access to 2.5 types of flexibility—but it's not always easy for employes to know what those types are. In fact, the flex types they want might not be the ones they need.
A 2009 study by Rand found that sleep deprivation costs the Japanese economy an estimated $138.6 billion in productivity every year. And sleep deprivation costs the U.S. economy three times that amount: an estimated $411 billion annually. The financial cost of sleep deprivation makes the case for flexibility even stronger. Flexibility is one of the best ways to keep employees well-rested and healthy, and in turn, more productive.
When flexibility becomes the norm instead of the exception, the phrase “rush hour”—which, frankly, is neither a rush nor only an hour—could leave common parlance. Flex has an outsized impact on the daily commute, and some metropolitan areas are already experimenting with workplace flexibility to reduce traffic congestion.
For as much press as workplace flexibility has received in recent years, infamous cases of flexibility clawback have also made headlines. We’ve all read about how companies like Yahoo, Aetna, Bank of America, and IBM, just to name a few, have restricted or revoked their remote work programs, much to the astonishment of observers accustomed to hearing only success stories about flexibility. The hype around these companies' so-called flex failures is proof of something we’ve coined, the “flexibility glass cliff.”
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