Some people discount ‘flexible working’ as some trendy new management fad or an earthy-flaky progressive approach for perhaps young or new organisations. Actually, the principles of flexible organisation and execution are considered one of the mainstays of perhaps the most rigidly controlled enterprise of all – military strategy.

Robert Greene’s excellent ‘The 33 Strategies of War’ examines it as strategy #6 – “Segment Your Forces: The Controlled Chaos Strategy”.

“The critical elements in war are speed and adaptability – the ability to move and make decisions faster than the enemy.”

And I have to include the following since no business guru piece is complete with out the obligatory Suntzu quote!…

“Thus the army…moves for advantage, and changes through segmenting and reuniting. Thus its speed is like the wind…” – The Art of War, Sun-tzu (4^th century BC)

Greene highlighted Mongol warrior philosophy (which practiced flexible organisation in hunting exercises…sort of a latter day ‘team building offsite’), and the German ‘Auftragstaktik’ strategy introduced by von Clausewitz (“their success culminated in the most devastating military victory in modern history: the 1940 blitzkrieg invasion of France and the Low Countries.”).

But the most dramatic illustration was the very heart of Napoleon’s whole approach to warfare (which in fact inspired the German ‘Auftragstaktik’ after they had suffered severely at the hands of Napoleon’s flexible prowess. He examined the Battle of Ulm where Napoleon’s 70,000 force defeated an alliance of Austria, England and Russia with a combined strength of 500,000 men.

“The key to the [Napoleon] system was the speed with which the corps could move…Little time was wasted with passing orders back and forth…Instead of a single army moving in a straight line, Napoleon could disperse and concentrate his corps in limitless patterns which to the enemy seemed chaotic and unreadable…In the end, fluidity will bring you far more power and control than petty domination.”

 
The brass-tacks business case for Dynamic Work is pretty straight forward – save money on under-used, un-used and mis-used office space and the stuff that goes in it. The benefits to carbon footprint, employee lives, collaboration and productivity, to name a few, are all just bonuses.

An important driver to these savings largely derive from the notion of ‘Pareto Efficiency.’ Pareto centres on allocating the right resources to the right usage. Also, sometimes referred to as the ’80-20 Rule’ referring to the notion that 80% of the benefits come from 20% of the resources. In the case of productivity, 80% of the productivity comes from 20% of the tools. As a result, productivity improves and costs drop if you invest twice as much in that 20% of the tools add remove the other 80% (though more practically you make the other lesser used ‘80%’ tools available on an as-needed pool basis).

Applied to the business workplace, all too many companies equip their workers with the equivalent of a standard, generic toolkit with pretty much all of the tools that they might need. Desk, chair, file cabinet, credenza, coffee machine, stationery, meeting rooms, work spaces, etc. Because they have to equip everyone with such a range of tools, businesses generally opt for the lowest common denominator versions of all of these tools. Maybe not bargain basement, but certainly not top of the range. Pareto suggests that if someone is using a ‘hammer’ 80% of the day, then getting that person the ‘Ferrari of Hammers’, even at the expense of taking away all of the other tools in the extreme instance, not only provides greater productivity return to the business, but also in most cases provides greater satisfaction to the worker.

This allocation is the heart of the win-win that provides the opportunity to businesses with Dynamic Work. Businesses can equip their staff with the ‘Ferrari of Hammers’ and they are happier (having such a great, central tool), more productive and in the end less costly (as the business pools the other tools as part of the bargain).

One of the pitfalls of poorly executed workplace transformations is when the company focuses solely on cost savings though pooling and consolidation. That approach becomes a pure ‘loss’ to the staff (they ‘lose’ 80% of the tools even though they only use them 20% of the time). Successful implementation of Dynamic Work has to involve a direct investment in a higher standard of ‘core tools’ in exchange for the surrender of those used less.

This principle is illustrated in my story ‘First Kill All the Office Buildings.’ The ‘tool’ in this instance was ‘facility for face to face collaboration’. The trade off was to jettison infrequently and non-optimally used cubicles, cavern-like conference rooms and expensive round the clock space for an exquisite venue and experience for a set time periodically.

The principle of Pareto has been applied extensively in the workplaces for employees’ own ‘life tools’, ie. their ‘benefits’, under the notion of ‘flexi-benefits’. The day care that is an important investment for a single parent may demand more of the benefit allowance than it would for an active single person who prefers the gym membership.

The IT functions of larger organisations are very familiar with this notion applied in the area of ‘systems virtualisation’. This technology has taken the IT world by storm in recent years with its gigantic ROIs and cost savings. The leaders in the field are VMware with Microsoft who both have countless case studies of big costs taken out of costly datacentres in very short time period. Again, the principle of Pareto applies. Previously, many systems all had an array of antiquated, sub-optimal, dedicated processing power. Virtualisaton ‘trades in’ the dedicated ‘tools’ (CPU, storage, chassis, etc.) for a shared or virtual system of the highest standard (upgraded hardware, upgraded software, etc.).

Footnote. The consensus seems to be that the ‘Ferrari’ of hammers is an ‘Estwing’ pictured above. It costs $23 on Amazon ($47 RRP) versus $10 for a ‘standard’ Stanley model. $13 premium might seems like an extravagance of nearly double the price. But for a carpenter’s central tool that would last nearly a lifetime, the incremental costs is easily covered by doing without ‘owning’ a couple of lesser used tools. If the hammer lasts 10 years and is used 50% of the time, then that is an incremental costs of 1 cent per day.

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.