Mobile working - why your best people demand it...

If you find it hard to recruit new IT staff, you're not alone. According to recent research by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (1), firms are struggling to find skilled employees and the IT sector is where the shortfall in talent is most acute.

The research is more evidence, if any were needed, that companies need to do as much as they can to keep their most experienced members of staff. Quite simply, replacing your best and brightest employees can be a long and expensive endeavour.

So how do you keep staff happy, especially when competitors are waiting for the chance to make them a better offer?

One way is to offer them flexible working. The 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey reveals that younger workers consider flexible working as one of the keys to loyalty (2). Similarly, consultancy firm PwC found that employees offered the ability to work from home were 48% more likely to rate their job satisfaction as 10/10.

Your staff want to work flexibly because they increasingly see it as the natural way of things. A paper by UK office space company Regus found that over 50% of workers now work outside the main office 2.5 days a week or more. It states that, in a world where private time is increasingly being invaded by work, staff are “clamouring to at least be able to enjoy the reverse of this phenomenon and to carry out their work tasks freely from any location they choose.” (3)

Perhaps more surprisingly, older workers also demand that freedom. Childcare and work life balance issues are both reasons for workers in their 40s and beyond to cherish the freedom that flexible working can bring.

It seems a no brainer, but are there any costs for companies wanting to offer more flexible working arrangements to staff? Not, it seems, in terms of productivity. An employee survey carried out for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that, “workers on flexible contracts tend to be more emotionally engaged, more satisfied with their work, more likely to speak positively about their organisation and less likely to quit.” (4)

So how do you make remote working a reality for your own staff? The CIPD advises that companies put clear policies in place and build in mechanisms to monitor the effects of flexible working.

But flexible working is often about remote working, and the challenges are often technological ones. Some of these are easy to surmount. VoIP calls and instant messaging apps are efficient and cost-effective ways for on-the-go workers to keep in touch with the office. Cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools like Office 365 mean that workers can take their most fundamental work tools with them. Modern mobile workers can now collaborate on many projects as easily as their office-based colleagues.

Predictably, the one downside to all this is security, and the requirement to extend your security procedures to the world beyond your company premises. Mobile workers are not tucked safe behind the office firewall, so getting the basics right is crucial. Make sure mobile workers log into your systems using strong security policies and via a Virtual Private Network (VPN). If home workers are allowed to use their own devices, restrict what data those devices have access to.

But for companies with a mobile workforce, the biggest threat to company data comes from a forgetful employee leaving his laptop on the train, or having a tablet stolen from the car. With that in mind, it’s worth considering the option of being able to remotely erase hard drives or secure devices with encryption.

Again, the cloud can be your friend. Moving data from devices to the cloud means replacing multiple security headaches with a single much more easily managed one. A cloud service like AWS workspaces offers professional levels of protection as standard, wherever employees are logging on from.

With security protocols in place, there seems little to stop many companies offering flexible working as a perk to in-demand staff. With competition for skilled employees stiffer than ever, it is one way of instilling loyalty. As the CIPD states: “(Flexible working) is a factor in employees staying with their current employer...Many highly skilled individuals are looking for flexibility in working hours.”

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