How can flexible work improve your recruitment and retention?

In Monster’s latest research 55.38% of UK companies are putting more focus on retention than acquisition. The cost of living crisis is also driving employee expectations –  45% of companies are increasing salaries to attract new talent, so how can you compete to increase retention without getting into a salary war? The answer is simple – The UK workforce wants flexible work.

Randstad research has found that 41% of Millennials and 40% of Gen Z workers would not accept a job if it did not provide workplace flexibility. Flexible working is not just ‘working from home’. You will have more opportunities to make better hires if you can be flexible about Where people work when they work and how they are working.  It should go without saying that leaning into remote-first structures will make filling those critical roles much easier and relieve the heavy recruitment burden on HR teams.

Where & How People Work

The consensus is solidifying around some form of hybrid working being the norm. There’s not necessarily an optimum amount: going fully remote will put some workers off, and going fully back into the office won’t impress those who love working from home. So you might think putting in a hybrid model, say 3 days at home 2 days in the office, will give you the optimum retention and worker satisfaction. But people really want the flexibility and agency to make work fit into their life. We think the models with the highest rates of productivity will be the ones with the most flexibility, where workers get more choice, that’s also giving employers more choice.

More roles are remote-friendly

WorkMotion’s Head of Trust and Employment, Pieter Manden, noted in his recent editorial that traditional means of combatting labour shortages are insufficient. Companies are doing themselves and their potential employees an injustice by not searching outside the geographical box. An increasing number of roles are becoming remote-friendly. With countries like Brazil and India harbouring 3 million unemployed people with a Bachelor’s Degree, remote-first policies represent an enormous opportunity for finding great talent without the hassles of relocation.

Flexibility is critical for retention – soon, millennials and gen-z will make up over half of the workforce. 41% of Gen Z workers have quit a job because it didn’t fit into their personal life. Of both Millenial and Gen Z, 36% and 34%, respectively, had quit a job because it did not provide enough flexibility. A separate Future of Work 2022 study by Buffer declared that, in all age groups, a whopping 97% of workers would like to maintain at least part-time remote work for the rest of their careers.

Workations

Flexibility in location isn’t just ‘work from home/work from Office – ‘Workations’ are rapidly becoming a significant employee benefit, for a good reason. Allowing people to work from abroad for some time is an excellent example of implementing increased flexibility. For employers, the beauty of flexibility as a benefit is that it is more or less free of cost. In fact, it can save costs. That is, as long as the employer does not pay for the workation and the workation does not trigger any unexpected obligations for the employer. Any unexpected obligations for the employer are likely to relate to the compliance risks around workations. A practical example would be the obligation for the employer to set up payroll in the destination country or the employer’s liability in case the employee requires medical assistance while working abroad. This raises the question of which compliance risks are related to workations and how employers can manage or mitigate these risks.

That’s where working with an experienced partner like workmotion takes the stress out of it. There are hurdles, but we’ve helped hundreds of customers navigate them and really benefit.

When people work

Flexibility can be with time as well as location. We’re in a 24-hour world. The Monday-Friday 9 to 5 model is a hangover from the manufacturing industrial revolution. It’s played its part but it’s not the most effective model. In Monster’s research, we saw more people wanting to choose their own hours as long as the work gets done. For those who are commuting and working in a physical location, it’s most people being on the 9-5 schedule that causes rush hour traffic jams. Staggered starting and ending times spreading that traffic more evenly through the day get everyone moving faster. It can also help productivity – research from the University of Melbourne into Circadian rhythms suggests that younger people are more productive later in the day, and that shifts earlier as workers get older. So if you find trainees are struggling to pay attention in the morning and then just getting into their flow when it’s home time, there could be a good medical reason for it.

4 Day Week

There are a number of global trials around 4-day-weeks. The largest one over is currently taking part in the uk -Over 70 companies and over 3,300 workers have moved to a 4 day week with no loss of pay. Peter Dowd, Member of Parliament for Bootle in the UK has introduced a bill in parliament looking to reduce the maximum hours worked per week from 48 to 32. Part of what’s driving this is that although the UK works long hours, we have one of the least productive economies: lagging 16% behind Germany and the US.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all flexible solution.

But we do see that when you enable staff to be more flexible, they are more productive, they have higher job satisfaction, they are more likely to stay in roles – and more likely to be an advocate for your employer brand. Flexible working is more attractive to younger workers: that means as a trend, it’s here to stay and it’s going to increase. The sooner you can adopt it, and the more flexible you can be, the more competitive your job offers are.