Recently I attended a symposium organised by the British American Business organisation at the offices of PR firm and workspace pioneer, Edelman, on the top of ‘Flexible Working – Who Benefits’.

For starters, it became startlingly clear that there were two major business benefits for companies to look at flexible working – to save money and to comply with the law.

IBM’s Chris Emin a thorough review of their vision ‘new ways of working’ with their e-Place on Demand as well as their own dogfooding of the principles. He made a very insightful comment that could have been taken straight from a SOA primer if you replaced the word ‘employees’ with ‘processing’ and ‘workstation’ with, well, ‘workstation’ for one (though Emin was referring to ‘workstation’ as ‘desk’ area):

“Once the connection between employees and workstation is broken, this allows for more efficient allocation of the resources.”

IBM have done research that the cost ‘per workstation’ (desk) is ‘£15,000 to £20,000 per year’. That is a lot of cost to target for removing from a business.

Field Fisher Waterhouse’s Peter Holt comprehensively reviewed the imperatives, opportunities and considerations in flexible working from a statutory as well as pragmatic perspective. In his Q&A, I raised a question with him which led to an interesting discussion, “What are the roles that are inherently and structurally less flexible?” For starters, we identified workers tied to big, hard to move capital equipment (eg. CAD/CAM systems, airline pilots). Holt noted that challenged small businesses have in being flexible with fewer resources to, both physical and human, around which pivot. I’ve raised this question on LinkedIn so share your perspectives there or comment here.

Copies of the slide decks from the event are posted here for reference.