Description

Join us as we explore this crucial, yet all too often overlooked, aspect of the post-COVID work environment.

Throughout my career, I've discovered that true flexibility in our work can significantly boost productivity and job satisfaction.

Flexibility isn't just about being able to work from home or from the office. It implies a corporate culture in which employees have a degree of freedom in choosing their working hours, workloads and collaboration methods. Such a holistic approach benefits both employers and employees, as it aligns their goals for mutual success.

True flexibility requires both management and employees working together. Companies must provide the necessary tools, resources and performance metrics, while empowering employees to control their working environment. Although this can be challenging initially, striking the right balance is crucial for long-term organizational agility and employee well-being.

Experimenting with different set-ups and learning from experience is part of the path to finding what works best. In this new era, leadership is about more than just staying in control; it's about inspiring teams to thrive in flexible environments while delivering maximum customer satisfaction.

Join us in this episode to discover how these principles can transform workplace dynamics and improve overall company performance.

Talk soon on LinkedIn,

Malou

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Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hi everyone, Malu speaking. I'm the author of Life's Notebook. Welcome to the Elevation Grid. I speak about career, science and wellbeing. Okay, enough. Let's talk. So how has my thinking about workplace flexibility changed since the COVID pandemic? So I was very unflexible in my thinking before. I was of the impression that employers had to be in the office in order to have great collaboration, to have productivity and also to have a certain company culture. which can be nourished by having employees in the office. But after COVID, there have been studies showing that employee productivity can be boosted by hybrid work. So working from home and from the office can be beneficial. But I would nevertheless stress that we need to have true flexibility, not inflexible hybrid flexibility or boundary-less flexibility where everyone comes and goes when they please, but really true flexibility which aligns the interest of the employer and the employee. And it's a top-down, bottom-up approach where the company provides the scaffolding, meaning the options of flexibility in terms of schedule, place, workload, the resources, the equipment, the way of measuring performance, the new performance measurement for this kind of work. And then you have the employees and the team, which can collaborate or decide on how they want to work together and control their work. So it's the employees who are responsible, who are accountable for their work. It's not for the manager to come and say, yeah, obviously that are the objectives, but the way the employees... achieve the work, how they organize, control their work, are accountable for their work, that's their business. It's not the company's business. Ultimately, what is the company's business is that the customer is happy. And that is also the objective of the employees. They have to organize themselves so that the customer, who really is the focus. is happy. So I think that with individual flexibility you can have more organizational agility. I'm absolutely sure that if you are well organized and this is something which doesn't happen overnight, you need to experiment this progressively and also it has to be embedded in the company culture ultimately. So it's a question of experimenting and embedding it in the company culture, which will help the flexibility to be really beneficial for the employer, the employee and most of all the customer.