High-performing organizations three times more likely to offer flexibility

Companies are not taking into account what workers want, despite much discussion around allowing employees choice in the new workplace reality.

Only 33 per cent of large organizations consider employee input when determining where work is performed, according to a newly released report from the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp).

And just about 25 per cent take employee feedback into account when considering when daily work should happen, found the survey of 1,199 executives and employees that took place in 70 countries.

However, high-performance organizations are three times more likely to provide employees with flexibility to choose where to work, the number of days they work in a given setting and the times during the day that work gets done, according to i4cp’s report Flexibility or Flight: Hybrid Strategies to Attract and Retain Talent.

“Organizations unwilling to maximize and broaden the use of flexibility are likely to face significantly higher rates of employee turnover as workers move to companies that offer flexible work arrangements… What workers want is true flexibility — the ability to work when and where it suits them best,” according to the report.

Employers can provide flexibility even for in-office workers, says i4cp, and high-performance organizations are two times more likely to allow these workers to stagger hours within a fixed schedule.

In October 2021, Amazon announced it is allowing individual teams to decide the number of days employees will have to be in the office and the number of times they can work from home, and KPMG is trying to recognize how hard the pandemic has been on workers by providing them with seven long weekends this summer.

Meanwhile, many employers are having trouble finding new talent, and while many have big plans in place to hire more people, the effects of staffing shortages are starting to play out on the bottom line, found a new report by Randstad Sourceright.

It revealed that two-thirds (66 per cent) of employers plan to hire extensively over the next 12 months. That’s according to a survey by Randstad Sourceright of more than 900 human capital and C-suite leaders across 18 markets.

Nearly one-third (30 per cent) of human capital leaders say talent scarcity is a major pain point. This was the top-cited response, followed by talent retiring or voluntarily choosing to leave the workplace (30 per cent) and increased competition for top talent (16 per cent).

Globally, a quarter of respondents said they experienced a reduction in profitability as a direct result of talent scarcity, and 25 per cent had to reduce the level of service delivered to their customers.