Flexibility – in terms of both working hours, and they way work gets done – is becoming the norm. Employees, especially those belonging to Generation Y, appreciate the freedom and autonomy flexibility provides.

But flexibility may be a little more difficult for those in middle management to accept.  Managers are the ones who are often ultimately responsible for ensuring that work gets done, so it is understandable that they may not be overly enthusiastic about giving their team some extra freedom. However, there are a few tips for getting around this resistance, as explained in Cali Williams Yost’s article on Inc.com:

Middle managers should participate in setting the guidelines for flexibility

When people are allowed to participate in establishing a process from the start, their buy-in and ownership of the practice will increase. The participation should include discussions with managers about why they think flexibility will be good, but also bad – which brings us to the next point:

Let middle managers voice their opinions and fears about giving people flexibility

When the potential problems around flexibility are fully and openly discussed, they can then be overcome.  Once the fears are addressed, it opens doors for managers to see the benefits of flexibility more clearly, and to focus on them moving forward and using flexibility to everyone’s advantage.

Make sure employees have as much responsibility as the managers

Yost refers to this as a ‘partnership model’ in her article. It is much easier for middle managers to accept work flexibility if the responsibility for getting the work done successfully is officially shared between them and their employees, rather than squarely on their shoulders.

Establish how flexibility related issues will be resolved

From the beginning it must be clear that any problems that arise due to flexibility will be resolved by the whole team, or all of the individuals involved – once again, the onus should not be on the manager only.

In the video below Polly LaBarre, from the Management Innovation eXchange, talks about the importance and value of giving people freedom and autonomy and at work. She says that managers and leaders should be changing their mind sets from ‘What can I control?’ to ‘What can I unleash?’ and ‘How can I unleash more contribution, more passion, more creativity and more effort from the people in my team?’

As an example, she discusses Morning Star – a company whose radical ‘self-management’ philosophy has been the subject of a previous post on our blog.  Polly explains how their philosophy is based on a number of ideas, including:

• People are happiest when they have control over their own lives
• The best organisations are not the ones where people are managed and controlled by others, but where people are allowed to organise and manage their commitments amongst themselves

It’s been established that money isn’t much of a motivator at work.  There are a number of other motivational sources that are far more effective and long-lasting – autonomy, a sense of purpose, and effective recognition, to name a few.

Jon R. Katzenbach and Zia Khan, co-authors of  ‘Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the Informal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results’ write the following in their article on Forbes.com:

But an even more interesting question on the ‘money as a motivator’ topic has been researched by Jia Liu, Dirk Smeesters and Kathleen Vohs. They investigated whether or not the mere thought of money has an impact on behaviour, and their results were quite fascinating (Dan Pink provides a great summary of the study on his blog).

Generally, as human beings, we are susceptible to social influence, or ‘peer pressure’. However, the three experimenters in this study found that when participants were primed with money, it had the opposite effect. When primed with thoughts of money, the participants were actively opposed to the opinions of others. As the researchers report:

If just the thought of money can influence our attitudes and behaviour – how agreeable or disagreeable we are with others – then imagine the potential impact of emphasising money as a primary incentive, or for keeping someone in a job in the form of a counter-offer, for example? Surely it can also have an effect on teamwork, and employees’ willingness to collaborate sincerely?

While these unfavourable consequences may not be obvious, or may be minimal, this study suggests that the potential is great enough to warrant consideration from management when creating incentive programmes, and in deciding how to give recognition to employees across the company.

In many companies, employee compensation is linked to performance – specifically how well employees perform on important business deliverables and projects. But compensation and rewards based on innovation is often something that is overlooked.

Jeffrey Phillips has written a book on the topic: ‘Relentless Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t–And What That Means For Your Business’, which offers wisdom on how you can transform your business from a well-run company to an industry leader.

As it stands, too much focus is put on employees achieving clear cut goals that are aligned with business success, which means innovation is put on the back burner . As he says in a excerpt found on FastCo Design:

One of the most important things companies should do to overcome this is to include recognition for innovation efforts in the performance evaluation process, as well as the compensation structure.

He gives a great example in the excerpt of such a situation:

Google is of course another excellent example of a company that makes innovation an integral part of it’s culture through their 20% time policy – and it cannot be denied that Google is an industry leader.

The key lesson here is that to solidify an innovative culture, companies must give employees the time and autonomy to work on other projects and, more importantly, reward and compensate employees for their successful innovative efforts.

More and more companies are open to the idea of adopting ‘unlimited vacation’ policies – Red Frog and Accessibility Partners are just two examples. On the surface, this seems like the best idea ever. Employees are happy because they’re being treated like adults, and can manage their own time and lives as they wish. Companies have less administration to deal with because leave forms don’t need to be processed.

But looking more closely, we see that there are actually a number of cons to such a perk too.

CareerBuilder conducted a survey last year that reports some interesting statistics.  Most notably, of the 5671 respondents, “Thirty percent reported they will contact work while on vacation”, and “12 percent of workers reported they feel guilty that they’re not at work while they’re on vacation.”

So when employees are on vacation, are they really on vacation? And if they are allowed to take unlimited vacation, couldn’t it potentially increase feelings of guilt – even if those feelings are completely unwarranted and self-inflicted?

People who may be particularly susceptible to this are those who are obsessively passionate about what they do – if their vacation time goes unmonitored, they may not take it. Or, they will go on vacation but take their work with them because they cannot switch off and enjoy some rest time. This, of course, is sure to lead to burnout repercussions.

While these are a few potential concerns surrounding unlimited vacation, it is a trend that is generally more positive than negative. But it could help to set a few guidelines or ‘rules’ in place for employees, so that they will not have any feelings of guilt or urges to contact the office when they are taking that holiday time:

1. Significant notice period – so that by the time the employee is on holiday, their co-workers are up to speed on exactly what they’ll need to take over, with no negative impact on productivity.

2. Alternatively, create a culture where everyone is required to be familiar with the specific roles and responsibilities of their co-workers, so that employees can go on holiday with short notice.

3. Do not allow employees to contact the office while they are on vacation (but still allow the company to contact them if an emergency arises).

4. Make it a requirement for employees to take at least some vacation during the year. Motley Fool has a great way of ensuring this happens:

It’s quite apparent that people want to be able to telecommute – a recent survey revealed that 5% of Americans would divorce their spouses if it meant that they would be able to telecommute! A significant amount of respondents also say that they would give up texting (30%), and a quarter say they would give up their smart phones.

But perhaps these are the most noteworthy statistics for employers: 17% of employees say they would forgo a salary increase, and 15% say they would accept half the amount of vacation days if they were allowed to telecommute regularly.

This is, however, just one survey and it may not be representative of the entire population. But what cannot be denied is that employees desire at least some degree of flexibility, whether it is being allowed to come in to work late and leave late, or work 1 or 2 full days a week from home. And why not, considering it is so easy to stay in contact with co-workers via the cloud?

The argument for adopting a ROWE is stronger than ever.  Here’s why:

• Flexibility is what employees want, and happy employees means better retention for your company
• Employees with flexi-time work more intensely and are more productive than when they’re required to be in the office all the time
• When employees work in a ROWE, they feel trusted – they know that their boss knows they will get the job done. That’s enough to motivate anyone.

The title of a fantastic article by Tony Schwartz for HBR says it all: Reward Value, Not Face Time.

What does it take to be a good manager? The answer is somewhat simpler than you might think. Aaron Nurick, author of ‘The Good Enough Manager: The Making of a GEM’ asked a substantial sample of business professionals to describe the behaviours and ‘style’ of the best and worst managers they had.

These 4 points are guidelines for what to do as a manager:

• Embrace the role of teacher and mentor
• Get to know your employees as individuals
• Help employees find strengths they may not immediately see
• Allow the freedom to fail and learn from mistakes

Read Aaron’s full article ‘Good Enough Can Be Great’ for more detail, and to see the list of manager “don’ts”.

This post was originally published on 18 August, 2011.

Employers are becoming increasingly aware that younger generations, millennials in particular, no longer commit themselves to working for the same company for their whole career.

This being the case, one could say it’s understandable if employers don’t go out of their way to offer great incentives for employees to stay.  From their perspective, why should they spend money training and developing people if they are just going to leave (possibly for a competitor!) if a better opportunity comes along?

But what about the other side of the coin? From an employee perspective, it is surely acceptable that they want to put their own best interests first, especially given that companies are starting up and disappearing at quite a rate. If they are presented with a better opportunity to further their own career, while also being at an employer that they feel may not be loyal to them, then why should they pass up that opportunity?

Lack of loyalty, either way, will have a negative impact on employee retention as well as productivity, as pointed out by Jeremy Kingsley in this article.  Employees are less likely to put effort into their work if they believe they are just a ‘temporary resource’ to a company, or perhaps even treated as such.

It seems that there is a ‘vicious circle’ when it comes to employee-company loyalty. The question is, which party should take the responsibility of trying to break this cycle?

Companies are certainly in a more powerful position when it comes to instigating change in the area of loyalty. They are the ones providing individuals with employment – they can choose whether or not to give employees growth opportunities, a great working environment, and how much autonomy and flexibility their people get.

Here are just a few tips you can do to increase employee loyalty, leading to better productivity and retention:

1. Open door policy – managers should make themselves highly approachable, so employees know they can raise any concerns they have. But managers also need to show employees that their feedback and opinions are taken seriously, and they are not ‘blown off’.

2. Share information – be as transparent as possible. Communicate with employees about what is going on in the business, especially when it comes to information that affects their job directly.

3. Establish clear roles and structures – when expectations are very clear, employees understand where they fit in and how their role contributes to their team and organisation as a whole, which gives them purpose.

4. Allow people freedom – within those clearly established roles and structures. When people are given autonomy within certain boundaries, they know how far they can and can’t go (in terms of decision making, exercising authority, and so forth). Along with this freedom, it should be clear that failure is acceptable, provided they learn from their mistakes.

5. Lead by example – leaders should get involved with doing the ‘dirty work’ with their teams. It will close the gap between the team and management level and help in building good working relationships (provided the leader doesn’t get involved in a way that could be perceived as them micromanaging!).

6. Have regular social work functions – to show employees that want to get to know them on a more personal level.

There are numerous ways to ensure that you retain the top talent at your company – one is to make sure their work is meaningful, another is to show them that the work they are doing is significant at an organisational level.

In a succinct post for OPEN Forum, Katie Morell expands on 5 further methods for retaining your best performers:

1. Find out what motivates each particular person, and individualise rewards accordingly.

2. Involve them in important decisions – doing this at a high level will help to give the employee a sense of purpose.

3. Give them ownership of their work, and autonomy – avoid micromanaging at all costs.

4. Let go of the low performers – this may sound harsh, but top performers don’t want to be redoing the work of others who can’t pull their weight.

5. Help them with their career path – take the time to find out what they want to do (and not simply give them opportunities they may not be interested in pursuing).

Peter Drucker, famous management theory and practice pioneer, taught us many lessons in his life time – about treating people right, and about the importance of creating a great organisational culture, amongst many others.

Another lesson to learn from him is about the power of doing the right thing, and acting with integrity. As William Cohen writes in his article for Human Resources IQ:

The article also goes through two very interesting case studies (on Johnson & Johnson, and the Chrysler Corporation) that provide an excellent illustration of how addressing a situation with honesty and integrity is almost always the better option.

Finally, Cohen summarises Drucker’s View of Integrity in Business: