One of the most valuable—and least expensive—benefits a small business can offer employees is flexibility. Workers are always seeking ways to better manage their work/life balance, and the ability to alter when and where they work can obviously make that easier.
Here small organizations have an advantage over larger employers, being significantly more likely to offer several types of flexibility, according to the Families and Work Institute’s 2014 National Study of Employers. Working with the Society for Human Resource Management, the institute studied a range of benefits offered by more than 1,000 employers, including 18 types of work flexibility.
Compared with employers that had 1,000 or more workers, the study found those with 50 to 99 workers were more likely to allow employees to:
- Decide when to take breaks,
- Schedule starting and quitting times within a range of hours,
- Work at home occasionally,
- Take time off during the workday for important personal needs without losing pay, and
- Return to work gradually after childbirth or adoption.
Offering flexible work options benefits employers by:
- Boosting recruitment and retention. Across the generations, workplace flexibility is the highest-rated noncash benefit workers are seeking, an EY survey found. More than 30 percent of men and women in Generations X and Y said they would leave their current job it failed to offer flexibility, and 25 percent of Baby Boomers agreed.
- Decreasing costs. A 2007 study by MetLife and the National Alliance for Caregiving estimated that workers with caregiving responsibilities cost employers an average of more than $2,000 annually for everything from workday interruptions to unpaid leave to replacing employees who find they can’t juggle work and caregiving responsibilities any longer. Flexible work options can reduce those costs. And if you allow employees to work offsite, you can reduce costs for office space, utilities and equipment.
- Increasing revenue. About 70 percent of employers in a global study commissioned by Regus said that flexible work policies increase productivity and revenue. The Harvard Business Review reports that companies where employees are allowed to work remotely several times a month were more likely than others to have revenue growth of at least 10 percent in the past year.
- Reducing worker stress. A recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that workers with more flexibility to work from home maintained their quality of work, while being happier and less stressed.
- Improving morale. Even simple changes, such as compressed workweeks that allow employees to leave early one day a week, can make workers happier.
To realize these benefits, you need to create policies and systems for managing worker flexibility. Find advice for setting up remote offices, tracking schedules and securing data in the cloud under the Plan tab at Backing America’s Backbone.