Top 10 Tips: Offering flexible working as an SME employer

1. Recruitment signifies your conviction in someone’s ability to do a job - trust them until they give you a reason not to.

2. Explain your reasons for offering flexible working and outline how the process will work. This is usually best communicated by the HR team. It’s important that employees understand the mutual benefits.

3. Set clear objectives and expectations to ensure managers and employees can monitor performance and productivity. Measure the achievement of these objectives, as well as staff satisfaction levels, to assess if flexible working is proving beneficial.

4. If employees go the extra mile for your business, e.g. in non-working hours, ensure their efforts are acknowledged and sufficiently praised or rewarded.

5. Establish procedures for managing the provision of flexible working, and let technology take the brunt of any resulting administration. Team planners can be used to monitor the whereabouts of different employees.

6. Some companies and managers may be more receptive than others. In more conventional environments, consider a piloted introduction of flexible working, rather than an immediate company-wide roll out.

7. Ensure all staff have secure access to the same resources and information they’d use if they were permanently office-based. Employee self-service technology can help, as can devices such as a laptop and/or smartphone.

8. Don’t see flexible working as an excuse to give managers a ‘breather’ – employees may be based in different locations at different times, but they still deserve support.

9. Establish effective communication channels, to ensure employees remain engaged, motivated and connected with their team and the wider business.

10. Remember that employees are unique so they’re unlikely to all benefit from the same approach to working. Don’t stick to a prescriptive route – offer choice that allows them to strike their optimum work-life balance.