This is the final theme in this series on Flex Work Gone Wild. The first three - Flex Work Trade Secrets Part 1: Leaders know their audience, Flex Work Trade Secrets Part 2: Design Integrated Systems and Flex Work Trade Secrets Part 3: Help managers and employees make informed choices were all about implementing a flex work program.

Now, I’ll get down to the bottom line and the fixation every flex work implementer has on data.

THEME 4. MEASURE THE TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE

Leading flexible enterprises are obsessed with data – the good, the bad and the ugly - and they use that data strategically to drive decisions at every stage of the Flexible Work Lifecycle. They use it to make program investment decisions, evaluate effectiveness against targets, communicate with the external stakeholder community by incorporating it into their annual CSR reports, and even to satisfy sustainable supply chain requirements.

3BL x 3

So when do you measure, and what do you measure?

Quite simply, you measure everything – and you start measuring before do anything else. You begin with an emphasis on discovering whether there’s even a flex work opportunity at all. Usually, this means measuring at the individual level. We want to know who works where and when, what kind of vehicles or mode of transport they use to get to their workplace, how far and how long they travel and how much it costs them to get to and from work. Of course, this data is also important as a benchmark for measuring the success of your program at the back-end.

During the implementation, we measure again. Here, we want to know who’s where in the implementation, how many people are at each stage and how long it takes to get through each stage. This tells us if there are any pinch points that need attention. We would likely also ask managers and employees about the program and how it’s affecting them. We might ask questions like: Is the quality of work improving? Is the volume of work increasing? How accessible are people to each other when they’re not sitting in the same place? What’s the level of satisfaction for each employee? Of course, this data isn’t as quantifiable as the number of kilometres someone used to drive, but it still gives us a good sense of how well the program is performing and if and where it needs to be adjusted.

Finally, we measure the success of the program when it’s running. This can be very specific, such as the environmental impacts of a program, the real estate savings, the efficiencies achieved by employees and so on. It can also be softer, for example around how people use the time they’ve saved by not having to travel. We know from past implementations that many employees give back some of the time they’ve saved, working longer hours to make up for the lack of a commute. So individual time-savings can benefit the organization as well.

Finally, of course, there’s ongoing measurement. Some organizations do quarterly and annual surveys, asking managers and employees to report on ongoing savings, or any problems.

Quite simply, we never stop measuring. And that’s what allows us to see that the aggregate triple bottom line impact can be quite staggering.  Here you can see the average annual 3BL benefits currently being realized by some our Flex Work enterprise customers with approximately 10,000 employees.

The final word

It’s a must to understand the impacts on the full range of metrics that are important to your business. Whether you are driven by cost savings, retention / recruitment, environmental performance, health and well-being, conservation, productivity, space utilization or all of the above, there are literally hundreds of 3BL performance measures that can and should be considered.  The flex work rock stars figure out what is most important to their stakeholders and then benchmark it, measure it, and measure it again.

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.

Now that we have a better understanding of the requirements of today’s knowledge based workforce (see Flex Work Gone Wild and Flex Work Trade Secrets Part 1: Leaders know their audience), the next question is how do we design a flexible, agile work environment that meets workers’ discrete and unique needs? And how do we do it in a way that works financially – particularly important when our budgets continue to get squeezed rather than expanded?

Theme 2: DESIGN INTEGRATED SYSTEMS

The flexible enterprise requires an integrated suite of technology, workplace and organizational infrastructures to support flexibility and mobility across a distributed work environment.

1. Technology Infrastructure: One of the core tenets of the Flexible Work Model lies in providing the workforce with anywhere, any device access to the organization’s core applications, services and data.

     Leading organizations have thought through the hardware, software, communications and network intelligence crucial to the success of flexible work. They have ensured that they provide secure access to information, data, applications and services anywhere, anytime.

2. Workplace Infrastructure: The second fundamental concept is what we call the “Network of Places.” This infrastructure configuration enables employees to work wherever their skills and knowledge can be most effectively deployed. Network of Places planning takes into consideration local conditions such as business strategies, infrastructure requirements, employee demographics and regional characteristics.

     By providing a mix of workplace types and locations, the Network of Places supports a range of employee needs. For example, an organization will provide flexible offices, drop-in centers and support for working from home or wherever work takes their employees. Employees will need a mechanism to reserve workspace and conference rooms in advance, modify or cancel reservations, or locate coworkers.

3. Organizational Infrastructure: Communication, knowledge sharing, collaboration and teamwork take on new dimensions within distributed organizations. The Flexible Work Model supports employees regardless of where they are located, thereby attracting and retaining the best talent.

     To make this work effectively, leading flex work organizations think about their human resources infrastructure in much the same way the rest of us think about our facilities and information technology infrastructure. They look at the major considerations across the entire HR value chain, with a particular focus on staffing, competency development, rewards and recognition, culture and affinity, and performance management.

When you bring it all together, your portfolio will include four or five work arrangements, each with a distinct set of technology, workspace and organizational enablers.

The workforce segmentation data you collected up front will also pay dividends at this stage of program planning and rollout, supporting your infrastructure planning and investment decisions by giving you a clear and objective view of the proportion of employees who fall into each arrangement.

Now we come to the “Big Green Button” Test: When you have people working in new places on a more frequent basis, there is a requirement to ensure that all work environment services are “dummy proof." If anything is more difficult than hitting a big green button, you have not done the job.

And then there’s the final, big question. How do you pay for all this when you and your customers are playing a zero sum game? There are two primary ways:

1. Follow the lead of IT and “virtualize everything”. The infrastructure “ownership” model has prevailed for the past 100 years, but it is time to move to a service-oriented model where employees use what they need when they need it, and put it back in “inventory” when they’re done. This will provide a better match to the way people work today, drive infrastructure utilization, reduce waste, and manage cost.

2. Balance your portfolio and balance your budget. Quite simply we are over-capitalized in some areas (e.g., facilities) and severely under-capitalized in others (e.g. technology and organizational practices). One of the keys is being able to leverage savings in one corporate resources function to fuel development in other areas. It doesn’t sound too complex, but this is a major hurdle for a large number of organizations. Industry leaders figure out a way to make it happen.

Coming up in Part 3: Help mangers and employees make informed choices

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.

The nature of work has changed and well over 100 million knowledge workers worldwide are undergoing a fundamental shift in how when and where they work.

Today’s knowledge-based workforce has the ability to connect with the people, information, and tools that they need from just about anywhere and at anytime. If properly managed, this shift to a more Intelligent Work model has the potential to deliver an extensive range of “triple bottom line” benefits for employers, employees and the communities where they live.

A Triple Bottom Line (3BL) is an integrative framework that extends financial accounting concepts to measure economic, environmental, and societal performance of an organization. Utilizing all three factors to gauge performance, organizations can understand and respond to all of the implications, constraints, opportunities and tradeoffs relevant to their line of business. 3BL gives organizations a full account analysis of costs and savings for operating their business, as well as the impacts on employees, stockholders, communities and regions further afield.

And as we know from every aspect of our work and life, one of the keys to improving performance is simply measuring performance. At Teletrips we help our customers focus on three primary performance indicators (Financial, Environmental and Societal) and look at the impacts across three interconnected stakeholder groups (Employers, Employees, and Communities).

FINANCIAL INDICATORS

The potential financial benefits for employers, employees and communities are impressive.

One of the key measures that continues to garner significant attention from an employer perspective is the potential for real estate cost saving. For a large national employer this metric can easily climb into the high eight figures on an annual basis.

But it is not just about cost savings - higher rates of retention, individual and team performance improvements, opening up new talent pools, lower energy consumption and lower utility bills, improved employee health and well being are also important measures with clear financial implications that being tracked by today's leading organizations.

Employees also experience a financial lift by working for an Intelligent Enterprise.

The typical employee has an opportunity to save $2,000 - $5,000 in after tax dollars. This combines lower fuel, parking, tolls and vehicle operating costs and other expenses related to daily trips into the office. In today’s uncertain economic climate, the ability to put $5,000 back in your employees’ pockets has to be viewed considerable economic stimulus package.

And it doesn’t end there. The communities where we live and work would also benefit to the tune of $1,500 - $7,500 in annual positive economic impact per knowledge worker. Given the fact that employees are spending more time in or around their local communities, there is a clear opportunity for business revitalization and to drive economic diversification.

ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS

An Intelligent Work Initiative aligns directly with the organization’s environmental, corporate social responsibility efforts, workplace sustainability and conservation efforts.

Organizations have an opportunity to save a total of 2-5 metrics tons of green house gas emissions per employee every year. The lion’s share of the enterprise emissions reductions are due to reductions in corporate facilities (less space to power, heat, light and cool) and employee commutes (fewer commutes equals less tailpipe emissions). But there are additional environmental considerations that can and should be measured such as energy and fuel conservation, water consumption at corporate facilities, and landfill waste produced in office towers.

Communities also experience net positive impacts when you consider the bi-products associated with reducing amount of time that their citizens are spending on the road. Fewer trips and shorter commutes equals lower gasoline consumption, reduces our dependence upon oil and other fossil fuel based energy sources, lowers traffic congestion, reduces noise pollution and decreases roadway run-off (a major cause of pollution in our rivers and streams).

SOCIETAL INDICATORS

There is an extensive body of research that demonstrates a clear linkage between the shift to Intelligent Work and a set of broader, macro-level effects.  Intelligent Work creates new job opportunities for groups formerly excluded from labor markets, enhances community development and improves health / well-being.

In his recent address (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/10/25/statement-president-national-work-and-family-month) President Obama stressed the connection between Intelligent Work Practices and overall quality of life “…at the end of the day, attracting and retaining employees who are more productive and engaged through flexible workplace policies is not just good for business or for our economy – it’s good for our families and our future”.

And the good news doesn’t stop there. There is even evidence that having employees spend 1-2 days per week working from home as part of an Intelligent Work program can help reduce neighborhood crime and residential burglaries (according to the FBI, 62% occur between 6am and 6pm).

BOTTOM LINE ON THE TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE

Many leading private and public sector organizations are taking a proactive role in leveraging the changing work patterns and work practices of the 21st century workforce to improve their triple bottom line performance.

Organizations like TELUS, TIAA-CREF and Scotiabank are using Intelligent Work as a viable strategy to manage the increasing demand for office space, a way to provide flexible work-life balance options with the potential to attract and retain employees, an effective business continuance strategy, as well as a viable alternative to commuting on our over strained public transportation networks. That is, they are all using Intelligent Work as a key method to drive their triple bottom line performance.

About Ian
Ian Gover is a pioneer in the field of distributed work. He has focused his 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. The company’s diagnostic, design, reporting and analytical software has been used by the US EPA and Environment Canada’s Commuter Challenge, as well as other government agencies and private corporations throughout the US and Canada.

Create a profile, join the conversation and let us know what your company is doing to measure and manage its 3BL performance. For those businesses in Ontario sending representatives to Avaya Evolutions at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (MTCC), Ian Gover will be at the TELUS booth from 12-1:30 p.m.and 4:30-6 p.m. today. Location MTCC North, room 205/206. Please stop by! 

Let’s face it - the 1960’s concept of a daily commute to a central location for a 9-5 workday simply does not match how most people work today.   Knowledge workers now have the ability to work anywhere in the world without leaving their neighborhood.  Quite simply, the nature of work has changed.

On the surface, the ability to reduce the daily commute or reconfigure an organization’s real estate portfolio might not seem like revolutionary ideas.  However, simply adjusting our work-places and work-practices to match today’s workforce requirements has the potential to positively impact a wide array of issues – for employers, employees and the environment.  It may be the most cost-effective way to reduce rush-hour traffic and can even improve how we insulate our businesses from disruption. It helps improve air quality, road safety, and work/life balance.  And adopting intelligent work-places and work-practices can even make organizations more profitable, which in today’s economy is certainly good news for all companies.

In his recent address, Scott McNealy, founder and former chairman of Sun Microsystems, spent a little time musing with senior leaders from Calgary business community on “what if he could do it all over again”.   No headquarters, no moving the “herd” in and out during rush-hour, and no jumping across the pond for a 1 hour meeting.  Instead he would leverage today’s advanced information and telecommunications technology to drive a more agile, more flexible and more intelligent work environment for the betterment of his workforce, his shareholders, and for the communities where the company operated.

More than 60 million knowledge workers throughout North America are prepped and ready to undertake this workshift.  And if we do it right, this transformation will trigger combined savings of roughly $500 billion annually for employees, their employers, and government agencies responsible for transportation, environment, and health.  In addition, it would also result in cutting 150 million tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions every year.  The big question for all of us is – will we heed Scott’s advice.

We have a rare opportunity to drive sustainable change.  But we have to keep in mind that this is not someone else’s issue to solve.  In this case “we are them” and we cannot pass this one down the line.  But the good news is simple adjustments to our daily work related choices can make a big difference.

Before you start work tomorrow morning ask yourself:

• Do I have to drive all the way downtown just to get on a series of conference calls with co-workers located in other cities?
  
• Can this two-hour meeting be accomplished via web conferencing or telepresence versus flying all the way across the country?
  
• Can I take a few early meetings from my home office and shift my commute out by a couple of hours
  

Over here at Teletrips, we're extremely excited about playing a major role in this workshift and we're proud of the positive impact we are delivering for customers, their employees and the environment overall.  That said, we can’t drive this new work (r)evolution alone.  Will you join us?

About the Author: Ian Gover, President & CEO of Teletrips

As President & CEO of Teletrips, Ian Gover 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.  Ian is a pioneer in the field of distributed work and 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.