In Flex Work Gone Wild I promised to share some lessons from the flexible work field and give you a peek inside some of the world’s leading programs.

So what makes flexible work work? There are four key themes that seem to flow through all the best-case examples. We know from the work we’ve done with organizations in this field that leaders:

1. Know their audience

2. Design integrated systems

3. Help mangers and employees make informed choices

4. Measure and report on the triple bottom line impacts associated with their program

I’ll take you through each of these themes in its own blog entry.

Theme #1. LEADERS know their audience

One of the key differences between the companies that have excelled in this space and those that have floundered is that the winners use objective workforce data. They study their workforce and gain a clear and objective understanding of their employees’ work patterns, work preferences and support requirements.

Sure, it would be nice if your workforce was homogeneous and everyone worked in the same way, with the same preferences, and the same requirements for workplaces, technology enablement and organization infrastructure.

But reality is different. Today's employees have widely varying needs and expectations that stem from different job types and work tasks, geographically distributed customers and partners, personal and family situations, and a range of work styles. So how do you possibly make sense of all this, and how can you possibly develop a work infrastructure that will support their unique requirements?

One of the things we are particularly proud of at Teletrips is the world- leading work we’ve done in the area of workforce segmentation, analysis and profiling. We’ve studied tens of thousands of knowledge workers around the world, across a wide variety of industries in the private and public sectors. And we compared worker types on 21 different dimensions of knowledge work. We looked at things like task urgency, the need for visual / acoustical privacy, internal mobility, external mobility, measurable outputs, informal team collaboration, cross-functional interaction, self discipline and motivation.

I always feel like the guy from the eHarmony commercial anytime I introduce our workforce segmentation system…  And in many ways the two are very similar. Instead of helping you find your perfect life partner, our system helps you find your “best fit work arrangement”. Not quite as romantic, but pretty powerful stuff.

What our detailed analysis has revealed is that there are actually six (and only six) distinct and unique knowledge worker profiles. And each segment has a distinct set of work environment requirements. Think about the road warrior moving from place to place … the distance collaborator spending a majority of her time connecting with people who are at some other location, or the individual contributor who spends most of his time doing heads down, focused work. They all have unique and distinct requirements – and the organizations that have solved the Flexible Work riddles have paid very close attention to the requirements of each segment in their workforce.

By clustering or segmenting the workforce in this way, we support three very important things:

1. You get a clear picture of the scope of flexible work opportunity – a clear delineation of the financial, environmental and societal benefits associated with the transition to flex work

2. You can compile and prioritize a list of essential requirements for your work environment infrastructure. Think HR, IT, real estate blueprints.

3. If done right, this type of assessment can also facilitate employee / manager decisions regarding program participation and directly support the company’s change management process.

Next time, we’ll look at how flex work leaders design integrated systems.

About Ian

Ian Gover is a pioneer in the field of flexible work. He has focused his entire career on helping organizations optimize their technology, workplace and human capital management infrastructure to provide a better match for today’s flexible workforce requirements. As President & CEO of Teletrips, Ian works with public sector organizations and Fortune 500 companies to help them improve their triple bottom line performance - improving employee effectiveness, realizing millions in operational savings, and achieving significant improvements in environmental efficiency. Prior to Teletrips, Ian held executive and senior management positions with Sun Microsystems and PricewaterhouseCoopers. He holds a Master of Science degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York.

About Teletrips

Teletrips (www.teletrips.com) is the leading provider of software as a service tools that help organizations improve their triple bottom line performance through Intelligent Workplace and Workforce Management.  The Intelligent Enterprise Software as a Service Platform is helping organizations around the world realize millions in operational savings, improve employee effectiveness and achieve significant improvements in environmental efficiency.