Much like the shirtless dancing guy in the amusing but compelling video above, workshifting is a physical movement--but instead of flailing your arms, you seamlessly move the location of where you do work. One day, you're meeting your manager online from a coffee shop.  And the next, you're prepping a client presentation while sitting at an airport gate.  This is all possible thanks to the World Wide Web and its wondrous ways of allowing us to use remote technologies.

• www.workshifting.com ;)
• "Work Unchained: Workshifting and the Competitive Edge of the Anywhere Office" [podcast, eBook]
• "Leading Virtual Effectiveness: Four Strategies for Effective Communication in a Distributed Workforce" [eBook]
• "The Top Ten Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers" [white paper]
• "Presenting the Business Case for Web Commuting" [white paper, podcast]

Today's guest post is by Diane Stegmeier is founder of Stegmeier Consulting Group, a consultancy focused on workplace change management. She is author of the book Innovations in Office Design: The Critical Influence Approach to Effective Work Environments, which was ranked the #1 Favorite Workplace Strategy Book by Amazon readers.


I recently had an invigorating conversation on a flight home from a client engagement. After the preliminary exchange of questions with the 50-something business executive sitting next to me ("Flying out or returning home?"; "Business or personal trip?"), we began chatting about our respective jobs. He asked, "So, what do you do?" Ordinarily, when I give my standard answer of, "I am a consultant in workplace change management," the reaction I observe is the classic 'deer in the headlights' look. It's frustrating, but I've become used to that being the end of the conversation because many people don't understand the shift to a more flexible workplace. Imagine my surprise when his reply was , "My company is considering an alternative workspace environment. Do you feel that Web commuting has become mainstream?"

Wow, I knew right away that the conversation would be a breath of fresh air. But the truth is, more frequently I'm standing face-to-face (or having a virtual discussion in this "work is what you do, not where you do it" business world) with senior business leaders who think they need to decide whether or not to allow staff members to work outside of their assigned workspaces. Employees are already conducting their work in a variety of places.

In fact, Stegmeier Consulting Group's workplace research has revealed that the average employee spends 63 percent of his or her business day working anywhere but their dedicated workspace.

A big struggle for executives is not knowing how to move off dead center...where to begin in developing a workshifting initiative. The challenge is creating the appropriate infrastructure--technology, security, policies, behavioral protocols, performance management, etc. -- to best support the distributed workforce in how, where, and when they perform their jobs.

It may seem a daunting task, but it is well worth the effort. With a strong business framework for workshifting, companies can benefit from both cost savings and the maximum level of employee productivity and satisfaction.


Benefits of a workshifting policy:
When I'm working with clients who are creating new workplace strategies, I draw from the findings of Stegmeier Consulting Group's 10-year research study of 140 organizations in 24 diverse industries. Applying best practices in developing and implementing workshifting initiatives ensures the client will significantly reduce workplace costs and improve employee productivity. Powerful ammunition, indeed!

Cost Reduction:

• Operate more productively with fewer resources.
• Analyze workspace utilization and refine workplace strategy based on actual usage.
• Establish business continuity strategy.
• Offer low-cost employee perks to offset reduction in company-paid healthcare coverage.
• Reduce energy consumption through corporate-wide Green initiative.
• Enhance security and control to prevent costly compromise of data.
• Implement productivity-enhancing technology and provide 24/7 support without increasing IT staff.
• Eliminate up-front costs of purchasing hardware and installing software by adopting browser-based solutions

Performance Improvement:

• Increase productivity through teamwork and collaboration despite the location.
• Improve employee morale.
• Provide staff more choices and control to balance work-life.
• Create a workplace to attract, inspire and retain talent.
• Accommodate the needs of the multigenerational workforce.
• Enhance employee access to company information where and when they need it.
• Challenge managers and supervisors to focus on the results, rather than on the tasks of their direct reports.
• Reinforce the corporate values of trust, teamwork and customer centricity.

How to Begin:
In one particular company, the senior business leaders struggled with how to begin creating a workshifting strategy. The executives knew the enterprise could benefit from enabling a greater level of workforce mobility, but were hesitant to jump headfirst into a new workplace strategy they felt could disrupt business operations and distract employees from their work. By developing and implementing a pilot workshifting program, rather than starting out by instituting a major enterprise-wide initiative, the client could focus on clearly understanding how to best support a manageably-sized group of 67 mobile professionals, refining the model and reaching informed decisions prior to launching a more formalized mobility program to other individuals within the company.

To prepare members of the workforce who were selected to participate in the pilot study, Stegmeier Consulting Group conducted a series of training sessions focused on company-specific issues and requirements called "From Resistance to Results: Guiding Business Leaders on Managing in the New Workplace™" (for senior managers and directors), "Mobile Workforce Management™" (for supervisors and managers) and "MobilityWorks™" (for individual contributors).

A conservative approach was also reflected in the amount of time people could work outside of the corporate facility. Individual contributors were given the flexibility to workshift two-to-three days per workweek. Managers were given the option to workshift two-to-three days as well. Supervisors, hesitant in trusting their direct reports who were out of sight, helped set the pilot program guidelines for their own job category and committed to workshifting at least a half day per week. Senior managers and directors, who ordinarily traveled on company business three-to-four days per week, agreed to spend some of their non-travel time working in the open, collaborative spaces in the pilot work area.

Hard Benefits:
Stegmeier Consulting Group conducted work-time studies prior to the initiation of the pilot workshifting program to establish baseline metrics for employee productivity. We repeated the work-time studies approximately six months following the pilot launch and discovered strong improvements in several critical areas:

• A 37.6 percent reduction in the length of staff meetings
• Managers had an average decrease in interruptions of 43.2 percent
• Individual contributors saved an average of 6.3 hours per week in commute time
• Individual contributors re-invested an average of 4.5 hours back into their work tasks
• Supervisors logged an average increase of 90 minutes of planning, goal setting and strategizing per week

While this client eased into a pilot workshifting trial period, once the cost savings and performance improvements were evident, the senior leadership team had a high level of confidence to quickly expand the program to leverage the many benefits of workforce mobility. Within 18 months, the organization had nearly 250 people enrolled in its workshifting program, when originally only 67 individuals were enrolled.

Over the years, I've struggled with how best to describe my work. The next time a person sitting next to me on an airplane asks what I do, I'm going to test a very simple answer--"I help our clients significantly reduce workplace costs while improving workforce productivity." Perhaps, the 'deer in the headlights' look will be replaced with a green light for continued conversation.

Listen to this podcast to learn how to present a business case for workshifting, or for a more in-depth look, read, "The Business Case for Web Commuting: How to Reduce Workplace Costs and Increase Workforce Performance."


What are your thoughts?
 

Today we have a guest post from Katty Kay.  Katty is the Washington correspondent for BBC News America and co-author of Womenomics: The Workplace Revolution that Will Change Your Life (2009).

Stephanie is sitting at her desk, half an eye on the clock, the other half on the light in her boss' office. She has finished her assignments for the day and there's really not much more she can accomplish until the next morning. It's midnight in Hong Kong and her Chinese client is fast asleep. Stephanie wants to go home but senses that leaving at 5pm would be frowned on, so she sits out the wait for her boss to leave and browses the J Crew sale. 

Stephanie is of course an imaginary figure. But she could well be anyone of us. She certainly has been me. And, told like that, her situation sounds absurd. She is simply wasting time - hers and her companies. Fortunately Stephanie's made-up situation is increasingly anachronistic. All around the world companies and their employees are waking up to the fact that clock-time is unproductive and flex-time makes sound business sense.

The workplace revolution, and it really is just that, is made possible by technology. Mobile devices allow us to do our jobs anywhere, anytime. Today we can deal with business queries just as easily from our kitchens as from our cubicles. Why waste an hour in traffic commuting to a downtown office when we can fulfill many of our tasks staying right home?  Just imagine how productively you could use that hour thinking, strategizing or talking instead.

Your client/boss/colleague/boardmember has no idea whether that email came from the sidelines of the football pitch or the desktop at your corporate headquarters. The BlackBerry is a thing of great beauty for everyone wishing to escape the tyranny of the office. What matters today is your performance not your location.

Technology may be enabling this shift but it's people who are demanding it.

In company after company, employees, both men and women, say greater control of their schedules is one of the things they would like most. Women with young children have been in the forefront of this charge. Faced with the crunch of career versus kids many professional women have decided to quit (in 2003 the New York Times dubbed this the opt-out revolution). These educated, career women felt they simply couldn't do the fifty hour weeks and have enough time for their families. 

But these women were useful, talented, experienced, and annoyingly expensive to replace so smart companies tried to find ways to accommodate them.  Capital One, a Virginia based financial services business, surveyed its women's network and asked what they needed to stop them from quitting. More flexibility came the answer. So Capital One introduced its "alternative work schedules" - a range of different work options including five days squeezed into four, part time schedules, conference calls and telecommuting. The alternative schedules were so popular Capital One took them out of the women's network and made them available to the whole company.

Electronics retail giant Best Buy has an even more radical approach. Best Buy has taken the clocks off the walls and implemented a Results Only Work Environment - a ROWE. Professional employees can work anywhere, anytime and are measured solely on results.

What's most encouraging about the companies which have implemented this novel approach to work is the results. At Best Buy productivity increased by an average of 40%. Capital One says employees become more committed, more productive, happier and retention improved. Other companies with similar flexible schemes are equally convinced - treat employees like grown ups, give them more control of their schedules and they will return the favor.
 
I know that I will sneak out the office back door to go to my son's school play whether I'm "allowed" to or not. But if I have to sneak the chances are I'll feel resentful. If I go with my boss's blessing I feel grateful and more inclined to do a good job.
 
What makes this revolution permanent is a generational shift. Gen X, and their even techier younger cohorts Gen Y, grew up in a mobile world. They conduct friendships on Facebook. They study online at Starbucks. They do pretty much everything virtually and they know, instinctively, that you don't have to be in a certain place (the office cubicle) to be productive. Indeed for Gens X and Y the very idea of having to be tethered to a physical location for 10 hours a day is anathema. They don't and won't get it.
 
That is as true for younger men as it is for women. Surveys suggest men in their twenties have similar attitudes to balancing work with family life as women. The genders sound remarkably similar. So the push for flexibility will no longer be a "women's" or a "mother's" issue, prone to always being marginalized, it will be an "employee" issue.
 
Some managers say they are still nervous of giving employees flexible schedules. They fret about the domino effect. "What happens if I let Anna, the office star, work from home one day a week and then Sarah, who is less great, wants it too? Soon the whole office will be clamoring for flextime."

Well actually, no. Accountants Deloitte and Touche have been in the forefront of what they call customizing careers (there are as many names for flextime as there are schedules). And they found that at any given time only 10% of employees actually wanted alternative schedules.
As for the Anna-is-great-but-Sarah-not-so-much argument that's frankly a red herring. If Sarah isn't doing her job well, that's a performance issue not a schedule issue. Moreover, if you start measuring your employees solely on their results and you set them clear benchmarks, rather than measuring them on how many hours a day they spend in the office, it is actually easier to see whether or not they are being productive.
 
Flexibility works. For men and for women. For people with children and people without children. It is no longer a favor to be handed out like candy at a kids' birthday party, it is a sound business strategy.  

If you found this interesting, you can register for this free Webinar on Friday, October 23 at 1p ET to hear Katty Kay explore how the 21st-century workplace is evolving, the role of women in this revolution and how companies that "get it" will acquire a huge competitive edge.

Photo by: Providence Public Library