The emerging realisation of business benefits to flexible work is being touted by one of the champions of emerging businesses, Dragons Den’s James Caan in last month’s Sunday Times piece titled “Technology is the key to cutting your overheads”. The sub-title goes on to assert, “The television dragon says you can find much more efficient ways of working”.

His article takes the words right out of my mouth – the power of technology, the cost benefits of flexible working, the recruitment and morale dividend, and the scrutiny over investing in physical offices…

“Some options won’t suit some businesses, but it is important nonetheless to embrace new technology to improve performance. Areas to consider might be the introduction of flexible working, outsourcing or simply better time management – all made possible by improved IT.”

If you employ 50 to 100 staff, consider the savings that could be made by introducing flexible working for 5%-10% of your employees. In return for providing them with a laptop and broadband connection you will reduce the cost of housing them in the building and the associated running costs. With advanced communication systems, an employee can be physically relocated but certainly not isolated in any way from the day-to-day operation of the business.

This level of flexibility might give you access to a different spectrum of employees, such as those who don’t wish to commute, or mothers returning to work. Flexible working might also increase productivity by allowing people to focus on specific projects, by improving time management and by generally raising staff morale through a better work-life balance…

As an investor in numerous businesses, I am able to use technology to increase the cost-effective opportunities. To help one recent acquisition secure customers all over the country, I established 10 virtual offices in leading cities across the land. Historically, I would have had to take on property, staff and significant running costs in 10 locations to present the market with the same company profile.

Today the use of virtual office facilities – a prestigious address with a mail-forwarding service and exclusive telephone number with call/message forwarding provided by a dedicated team – has created an immediate national presence without high overheads. Using this technology to present a national – or even global – operation to your customer base will cost as little as £100 a month for each virtual office. Compare this with the costs and time invested in running your “physical” offices, where the only extra value gained is the ability to interact with other employees – all other functions can now be serviced through technology.” 

A little while back The Sunday Times did great piece on remote and flexible working: “Home is just the job for workers” (subtitled ‘A growing number of companies are adopting more flexible employment practices for their staff”)

It highlighted the aggressive strides that companies like BT, My Travel, Lloyds TSB and HSBC were making to exploit this new approach to working.

As head of BT Workstyle, the division of the telecoms group that sells equipment and technology to other large corporations wanting to get their own employees geared up for home working, Dunbar is something of a zealot. Since 1988, he has worked from a purpose-built shed in his back garden, and likes to joke that his daily commute is about ten seconds – two when it’s raining. It might sound eccentric, but Dunbar’s working practices are becoming the norm for thousands of British workers attempting to achieve a far healthier balance between their careers and their home lives than they might have otherwise enjoyed…[A] number of big British companies are shifting more staff over to home working. At BT, for example, a little over 13,000 of the group’s staff have decided to take this option.”

And echoing my post ‘First Kill All the Office Buildings’…

“Michael Geoghegan, chief executive of HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, threw his weight firmly behind a drive to remove 4,000 of his London-based staff from the group’s Canary Wharf headquarters and get them working from home instead. Speaking at a conference in Lisbon, Geoghegan said: “I’ve challenged us within seven years to have 50% of that building empty, to sublet to someone else. I don’t think we’re a really progressive, perceptive company if 8,000 people have to get up every day at an unearthly hour and go back again. Technology should change our thought process.”

I presented at a senior management board for a major investment bank on mobile technology a few years back. Part way through, the CIO interrupted and started my critique for being out of touch with the realities of their business and the requirements of the trading floor. Thinking I had totally missed the mark, I was saved by someone who jumped in and started confronting the CIO. He said, ‘where do you think our top traders work out of? Our City offices?? Not a chance. They are in Monaco, Jersey, Cayman Islands, Gibraltar. I can’t remember the last time I saw them in the office.’ ‘And it not just the big guys either,’ he continued, ‘more and more if we want to attract the very best and brightest out of schools, these hot shot kids are demanding these fancy new technologies that they have grown accustomed to in university. If we don’t offer them, then they question if we really all that sophisticated and ‘world leading’ as we claim and they opt to go work some place else more dynamic.” The interloper was the Head of Trading who had invited me to speak and set up the topic in the first place to shake things up and drive more innovation in the business on new ways of working.