Flexible workplace: Lots of talk, little action

In spite of gas prices now topping $4 per gallon, employers are slow to offer employees the opportunity to telecommute to offset rising transportation costs. According to a recent survey conducted by staffing firm Robert Half International, only 11% of companies surveyed are letting employees work from home as a way to help them curb their commuting costs.

In fact, telecommuting remains such a scary concept to employers that they're more inclined to increase mileage reimbursements than-heaven forbid-let employees work from home, according to the Half survey.

That's a strategic mistake, says Karol Rose, a long-time expert on workplace flexibility. Employers stand to gain several advantages, Rose says, by granting employees more control over where, when and how they work, through formal and informal flexible work arrangements. These may include telecommuting, job sharing and compressed schedules (e.g. four day work weeks.) Rose has authored five books on flexible work practices and has spent 25 years advising Fortune 500 companies on flexibility. She now serves as CMO of FlexPaths, which has developed a web-based portal that employers can use to develop and manage a strategy and policies for flexibility.

Rose says flexible work practices attract and retain talent in an age when organizational value is tied up in employees minds. Nearly one-third of employees surveyed by Robert Half (30%) noted that they're looking for new jobs closer to home to reduce their commuting costs.

A flexible workplace also improves employees' productivity and can reduce organizations' facilities costs, she adds. CIO.com spoke with Rose about the state of workplace flexibility efforts, the reasons why so many employers remain resistant, and what approach to flexibility breeds success.

There's a lot of talk about flexible work arrangements and workplace flexibility these days, but is there an equal amount of action from employers? Are employers actively implementing flexible work arrangements?

There is a lot of talk, but the activity has not met the rhetoric. Many companies have had to address the issue of flexibility in some way. It's often bubbled up because a very desired employee says, 'I've had it. I can't work this way anymore,' and the company realizes it needs a policy to manage flexibility in the workplace to retain talent. But these companies aren't using flexibility as a strategic tool, to achieve business results. They've generally approached flexibility as a one-off situation to accommodate individual employees and very programmatically. In other words, they've put in place formal arrangements that require some kind of written agreement between manager and employee, and they rely on that as their whole approach to flexibility.

What's wrong with that?

We've created a way to manage flexibility that is inflexible. It's an oxymoron. It's also not working as well as it could because it's reactive and one-off. Companies that take a formal approach to flexibility are missing out on the real potential of flexibility and opportunities to take a broader, more strategic and more inclusive approach to it. Formal flexibility arrangements are just one leg of a three-legged stool. The other legs are informal flexibility and career flexibility.