Flexible working If you cant trust your employees, why hire them in the first place

Flexible working If you cant trust your employees, why hire them in the first placeFlexible working If you cant trust your employees, why hire them in the first placeWhen I conducted some research with millennials, I found that flexible working was vital for any modern employee, with 91% saying flexible working was important and 92% saying they wanted the option to work from home. Interestingly, however, 66% said they would prefer to work mora in the office than at home and0% said they would want to work exclusively from home.As someone who has worked 100% in the office, 100% at home, a mixture of both and on the road traveling round the country, I have had a fair amount of experience of the various ways of working. Sadly, there is no utopian way of working aseach scenario has its positives and negatives.What is flexible working?The important thing to notlagee is that flexible working does not simply refer to where you work (i.e. Home or office) but also whenand how you work. Flexibl e working should mean that youhave the flexibility to manage your time and resources in a way that is most effective to you.This allows you to be the mostproductive so that thework is not only done, but gets done to best quality possible while maintaining a better work life balance.For example, when working in advertising agencies, it binnenseemed that the more creative people did not like early mornings and preferred to work later. As such, I would rarely see members of the creative team in themorning but a few hours laterthey would be in, full of life and energy, ready for the day ahead. Come 6 p.m., they would often go for a drink with everyone else who were finishing work,beforeheading back to the officeto craft their next masterpiece late into the evening (often with empty pizza boxes and beer bottles as evidence on their desks the following morning).Work can happen outside the office, tooWhat I learned fromthis experience was that being creative and applying yourself does not just happen in the office between the specified hours of 9-5, so trying to force it was counterproductive.In such a competitive marketplace wherethese creative and innovative thoughts are the things thatmove businesses forward and tischtischset them apart, it is vital to allow employees to work in a way that is best for them as it ensures motivation and creativity remain high and the best work is delivered time and again.This flexible approach to work also helps businessesretain their best talent, as they are givingtheir employees an option to do great work, but in a way that fits their lifestyle providing a win-win scenario for all.All this being said,the practicalities of business mean that you do need to have team meetings and be face to face at times, but this can easily be solved by having a few fixed days and times when everyone has to be in the office - for example, every Monday and Wednesday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. everyone has to be in.This means all core meetings and de partment meetings could be held between these times, but then the staff have the ability to work flexibly for the rest of the week in order to deliver the work required. On the odd occasion whenkey meetings do need to happen outside of these allotted times, video calling and fast connectivity has improved so much that you can easily get on a video call or share your screen from anywhere.Trust is keyHowever, for all the benefits thatflexible working brings and the new ways of working offered by technology, none of it canhappen without trust. Sadly many companies have the mentality of out of sight, out of mind, i.e. if they cannot see you they do not think you are working.This is why the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayers decision in 2013 to ban all remote working was so controversial,as many saw the decision as her saying she didnt trust her staff to work properly if they were not present in the office.Also, statistics show that people who do work away from the office overcompensate with t heir communication and work longer to show their colleagues they are in fact working. This is in response to the negative view many have that thoseworking remotely are just having a day off.This mentality and lack of trust defeats the point of working flexibly in the first place as you end up working more hours and feel guilty, meaning working the set hours in the office would have been the better option.We need a modern approachModern businesses need to removethe old habits ingrained from the industrial erawhere you wentto a single place of work between 9 and 5 every day to perform standardized tasks. Instead they need to recognize that the world has moved on, modern service based jobs are significantly different to the manufacturing jobs of the past, technology has improved and become widely available and people work differently.They need to trust their employees to take accountability of their own workload and time management to get things done, whether this is at 9 a.m. in the o ffice or 9 p.m. at home.If businesses cannot trust their employees to work flexibly then surely they cannot trust them with anything else such as confidential business informationand financial details?And if businesses do not trust their employees, then it begs the question why did they hire them in the first place?This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.Adam Henderson is the founder of Millennial Mindset.