The 5 Steps to Sustainable Flexible Working

We are now quite some time into the big WFH experiment and it’s one we already know succeeded. No one out there, not even the Elon’s and the Jamie’s of the world are trying to claim anything other than the truth - if remote work worked for you and your enterprise at any one point during the lockdowns then it works in general no matter when or why.

Most places will even be honest enough to admit that it worked better. That productivity is in fact higher. It’s a foolish metric to look at though because we now know that everyone worked themselves to the bone during the pandemic and many of us felt an enhanced sense of duty to both pull our weight at work and to ensure we do as much if not more during a difficult circumstance, in order to not add our lack of focus or worries or even the negative mental states we found ourselves in, affect our performance and as a result, we have inflicted serious levels of burnout on ourselves.

Pandemic remote work, should of course be nothing like everyday-non-crisis remote work though. While the ask may have remained the same - that people perform their work from their homes- everything about the context has actually changed. When the element of force majeure is removed, what’s left has to be comfortable and valuable enough to be sustainable.

Unfortunately, arriving at a place where the work shifts from unintentionally flexible and remote to intentionally flexible and remote will never happen in the absence of considered and sustained effort and the shops that haven’t invested in a transition to the new ways of work will live to regret it. This transition should have included everyone’s voice, it ought to have shunned command and control; succeeded to empower teams and individuals; and cast aside the traditional need for antiquated structures and processes in favour of a new dawn complete with open dialogue, no fear of failure, autonomy, personal responsibility, mutual respect and empathy and a willingness to build a new workplace reality away from the damaging misguided illusion of "professionalism equals no feelings" of old and into an age of cooperation and innovation.

The enterprises best positioned for outcomes-based flexible work have had (or, at the very least have firm plans to have)