Member Article

How can businesses help their employees find a good work-life balance over the half term holidays?

Paul Lawton, General Manager of SMB at O2 Business

Half term can be a difficult time to manage staff schedules and holiday calendars for small business owners. It doesn’t matter whether you have a workforce of five or fifty, there’s a risk of being left with staff shortages and increased pressure on employees trying to balance work with looking after the kids.

Promoting flexible working can be a perfect solution to this dilemma. Not only has it been shown to have positive results for employees’ work-life balance and their productivity; with the range of readily available technology to support working remotely, there’s also no reason to be left in the lurch.

Most people work best when they get to split their time both in and out of the office, and research commissioned by O2 showed that businesses offering remote working benefitted from a 20% jump in workplace productivity and a 20% decrease in costs. As well as saving large amounts on commuting, staff could also spend more time with their family.

Happy staff provide great benefits to any business, including a higher rate of staff retention and a reduction in absenteeism. Offering a smarter working plan to help employees achieve a greater work-life balance is an important aspect of this.

The new Flexible Working Legislation that came into force on the 30th June 2014 gives the right to those without parental or caring responsibilities to apply to work flexibly as long as they’ve been working for their employer for at least 26 weeks. Whilst business owners might have expected to see a flood of applications coming their way, the stigma of working remotely can put people off and hinder their productivity.

It’s important to foster an environment where flexible working is accepted, and this needs to be led from the top. Over the last few years, smarter working has become a common practice at O2 – and it really has been driven by a significant change in our culture.

Our own flexible working pilot at our head office in Slough, showed that O2 employees saved 2, 000 hours of travel time when they were allowed to work from home for the day, with the majority (52%) spending this extra time with their loved ones. 36% of staff also claimed to have been more productive out of the office. The pilot was such a success that everyone was assigned a ‘flexible working day’ to encourage people to work outside of the office and in a location that is best for them and is going to help them produce the best results.

The benefits of mobile working mean that employees can respond to emails whilst waiting at the school gate, conference call in the park and make free calls in WiFi zones using apps such as TuGo from O2. Businesses need to have the right tools for their employees so they can fit their work around their personal life. Laptops equipped with Microsoft Office 365 for example, the cloud based office system, mean staff can work anywhere, and apps like Just Call Me mean they can dial into a conference call on the go. These tools are relatively inexpensive and can be deployed easily across a workforce with a high return.

This half term is the perfect time to trial out some flexible working initiatives in your own business. Instead of struggling through the week with a depleted team, seize the opportunity to test run your staffing plans for the Christmas holidays or the summer break next year.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by O2 Business .