Governing flex? Start with better questions

Who’s working from home and how often?

Last week there was a quiet story about how many public servants in New Zealand are working from home. 

It followed the government’s interest from September 2024, in public servants working from home and their concerns about the practice. 

The public service commission decided to measure what was going on with working from home and completed a survey across the public service agencies in November last year. Those results were published last week and the reason the story was so quiet is because it wasn’t very interesting. 55% of the public service doesn’t work from home and a third work from home at least once a week.

Are these good numbers, bad numbers or simply irrelevant?

Who knows? The only way we turn this into an interesting story in any organsiation is if we ask better questions.

Ask Better Questions

Governance is all about asking good questions. Questions that test the extent to which a business practice is delivering on the organisation’s goals and strategy.

Asking, “How much working from home is going on?” is a dead end in that respect. On its own, it can only provide an answer that is detached from meaningful insight and therefore creates inertia, rather than galvanising energy and driving next steps.

A better, more enlightening, question might be, “what does the organisation want from offering working from home?”

Flexible and hybrid work are here to stay. There is plenty of evidence to support that, so whether or not we should be working from home is no longer the debate. The interesting focus instead is to explore how to make the best of it. We know that so many benefits are on the table, yet we mostly haven’t been clear about what we want as we govern and lead our organisations. Much less have we then monitored whether or not those intended benefits are indeed coming to fruition.

If you’re governing your organisation’s flexible work practices, what do you expect in return?

What do you want from working from home?

If you’re not sure yet, I’d suggest three good places to start.

1. A reliable workforce: People search out the opportunity to work flexibly, so if you’re looking for a reliable and talented workforce in return for your flex offer, you’ll want to look out for trends such as:

• Increasing average tenure

• Lower quit rates

• Shorter time to recruit

• Higher levels of employee engagement

• Lower levels of stress and fatigue

• Lower levels of sickness absence

2. Stronger performance: Hybrid work, when done well, has some structure and coordination in place. Through upskilling your leaders and teams, you’ll experience even stronger performance as people learn how to make the best decisions about what work to do from where, with whom, at what time. They’ll also make use of technology and asynchronous ways of working, so that they can enjoy high quality connections without having to be in the same place at the same time. Tracking performance alongside your evolving flex practice will give you assurance it’s delivering.

3. Diversity: Flexible work enables more access to high quality work for everyone, especially those who experience barriers to entry and progression. If your business is looking to make better quality decisions by having a diverse workforce that reflects your customer base at every level, then flex is the way to go. Measure the diversity of your workforce and the rate of flex uptake at each level, right through to senior leadership. That way you can pinpoint where flex is working for you and where it might need some additional support. Often, it’s the mid-level leadership that becomes a pinchpoint. Mid-career and mid-life can often be a time when barriers become too much and the people you want to retain begin to opt out. Keeping a focus on flex at every level means you’re more likely to achieve the business goal with decision making reflecting the customer-base you serve.  

Win-win works when you know what you want

Let’s take our flexible work practice from an argument about what is too much working from home and instead govern it by asking good questions and measuring the benefits we’re looking for. We’ll only trust that flex is a win-win if we can assure ourselves and others that it’s delivering on its promises that it's good for people and good for business.