Lucy Tobin: It makes business sense for companies to let their employees work flexibly

Staff prefer it: flexible working is more likely to motivate employees and increase productivity than pay hikes or bonuses, according to an HSBC study of UK businesses.

Some 80% of employees told a separate YouGov poll that remote working “encourages them to increase productivity”. That’s partly because working from home frees the 81 wasted minutes of the average London commute to, er, work rather than sweat-bathe on the Central line.

It’s partly, too, because of Fear of Being Labelled a Slacker Syndrome — being so keen to avoid being dragged into an office again as to work twice as hard as in the old MDF cubicle days.

In London, the expense of housing and childcare mean flexible working is the only way most families can — ridiculously — afford to have two parents with careers.

I’ve had this hammered home having just returned to work after a second child: putting my toddler and baby into full-time daycare near my zone three house would cost £38,000 a year (a quote which didn’t even include gold-plated nappy cream: I checked, but they weren’t amused). Working flexibly, though, means I can write in the evenings and weekends as well as when my kids are at nursery, making it financially possible for me, and millions of parents whose skills might otherwise fizzle out, to work.

Flexible working is one of the cheapest “perks” firms can offer. It’s even one of the (very few) issues on which the CBI and the TUC agree: the former says flexible working is good for business, the latter that it’s beneficial for workers. And the BEIS’s taskforce is the government renewing its push.

All that’s lacking is a culture that makes it okay, not embarrassing.

UK plc needs to learn from Robbert Rietbroek, boss of PepsiCo in Australia and New Zealand: when he goes home at 4pm to pick up his kids, he has a policy of “leaving loudly” because “if it’s okay for the boss, then it’s okay for middle management and new hires”.

Rietbroek reckons “the output or outcome is more important than the time someone physically spends in the office. When employees are happier at work and getting quality breaks away from work, they are more productive and we see better results.”

It’s not just stomping out of the office or vague HR policies that’ll change how we work.

The new industrial revolution needs to focus on productivity, not how good a person is at sitting at a desk longer than their colleagues.

Next time someone knocks on John CEO’s office door asking about flexible working, the focus should be on what people are doing, not where they are doing it.