What is flexible working?
Flexible working means thinking afresh about the way you and your staff work, making the most of advances in I.T. to help you achieve both business and personal objectives.
At a very simple level, examples could include:
- making more use of teleconferencing rather than spending time and money travelling to meetings
- enabling your staff to carry out some of their work from home rather than travel into the office every day
- adopting a more flexible approach to when work is done. Perhaps it would suit some of your staff and the business better if some of the work were carried out in the early morning, in the evening or at weekends?
Some businesses will want to invest in technology to realise even greater benefits from flexible working. Examples include:
- installing a Virtual Private Network so that your staff can all work from home just as efficiently as they could in the office
- supplying staff with wireless enabled laptops so they can use broadband hotspots as they travel around and so minimise downtime
- having staff working from a number of different locations around the UK - or even around the globe - connected together by broadband
- using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony to save on the costs of calls between employees working remotely and the office
Some businesses even decide that they no longer need a permanent office at all - with dramatic cost savings!
For more information on flexible working, click here to check out www.flexible-working.org.
