If the public sector can benefit by £15 billion, the savings available to the private sector would dwarf that figure. Flexible working, prompted by major developments in communications technology, had become integral to commercial life: according to the Office for National Statistics, more than a quarter of the British workforce "sometimes" work at home, although the number of people working 'mainly' at home is just 2.9% of the workforce, or 851,000 people.
Most of us would agree flexible, mobile or remote working is a positive development. As well as saving the public sector money, the Government also sees flexible working as 'parent friendly' and as a way to reduce the strain on the UK's public transport network.
Employees, meanwhile, generally welcome the chance to break out from the 'nine to five' and work when and where they are most productive, although many would still chose an office environment the majority of the time.
But flexible working isn't without its difficulties. Line managers can feel out of touch if their charges aren't within line of sight, let alone in the same building as them. Good management has always thrived on face to face contact and 'keeping an eye'; something that is much harder to do remotely. HR also has obligations that distance doesn't help with: e.g. keeping employee data up to date, recording time and attendance, and sickness and holiday.
Thankfully HR technology has, to a large degree, kept pace with changes taking place in the world outside and is able to support the flexible working revolution. Cloud hosted HR, payroll and time and attendance solutions offer HR and line managers the sort of information they need to manage remote workers, as well as helping the flexible workers themselves, in a way that simply wouldn't have been possible with old technology.
Cloud hosted HR and payroll software helps organisations manage the complexity of a flexible and geographically diverse workforce centrally, while being accessible from anywhere.
This means that an employee in the Scottish Highlands could have his training and development, appraisals, performance management and payroll, for example, managed and administered by an employee in Cardiff for a company headquartered in London.
More specifically, modern time and labour management solutions allow employees to break down and record specifically what activities they have been working on in any given period; all from an online portal. This isn't a surveillance system as it doesn't monitor what employees are doing automatically, but rather trusts employees to input data themselves. It allows managers to analyse up to date, real time information, while employees are able to record their time in a simple and efficient way. Not only does this allow a manager to 'keep track' of an employee's activities, but it also increases the visibility of the worker, ensuring they don't get 'lost in the system' by not being in the office.
As well as this, giving employees access to the HR system remotely means that a plethora of HR interactions can be completed by them while working from home or elsewhere. As well as filling in a timesheet, the employee can request or view holiday, report sickness or check personal details, as well as filing for expenses. All this removes the need to visit HR to hand in paper forms.
This technology is helping to transform the way people view work. As recording employee activity becomes easier - rather than just recording when an employee has worked - the whole concept of 'office hours' becomes obsolete. Rather than hours worked, modern systems allow companies to record 'tasks completed', removing the traditional strictures of the nine to five and empowering flexible workers to focus on productivity rather than time.
Indeed, a recent report by the business writer Alison Maitland and HR consultant Peter Thomson backs up this assertion, suggesting that there will soon be universal flexible working and staff will be rewarded for results rather than contracted hours. They go on to suggest that offices will shift, over the next decade, from being nine to five workplaces to meeting places as many employees decide when, where and how they do their jobs
Technology can also change an HR department's recruitment and retention strategies. If employees no longer need to be based in one place, then it opens up the talent pool significantly. In addition, with a greater focus on what, rather than when and where activity is taking place, there is no reason for part time employees to feel like second class citizens and may even encourage more people to try it. Likewise, rather than leaving an organisation to focus on childcare or look after a relative in old age, flexible working technology can help organisations keep talented employees on their books.
The pace of technological change is likely to increase, changing further the way we live our professional and personal lives. It's important that organisations focus on how these changes can benefit them and look at the ways technology can help them manage their human capital better, while helping employees work smarter.
Trevor Townsend, product development director, ADP
