BUILDING THE FLEXIBLE WORKSPACE/CIO Connect Magazine February 2008.

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The need to proactively support flexible working has never been higher up the corporate agenda. Recruitment challenges, legislation pressures, environmental targets and unfavourable economic conditions are colliding to such a degree that any organisation that wants to remain competitive has little choice but to embrace the practice with open arms.

But just what's involved in pushing flexible working to the fore? Is this predominantly a technological challenge, or a complete business rethink?

Clearly, culturally, a substantial shift towards flexible working throws everything up in the air, from the way teams are managed and productivity is measured, to the way quality of working life and corporate identity are maintained.

Now that businesses can no longer afford to sideline flexible working as a luxury for the few, what best practices can they draw on to ensure they reap all of the benefits, and avoid creating new problems?

We have drawn on the experiences and views of three trail-blazing CIOs, who have made good progress with transformational flexible working strategies to find out just what's involved - and the potential prizes that lie in store.

As a consultancy and systems integrator providing advice and services on the subject to its customers, Capgemini has to lead by example. Called in to help organisations address issues of transformational change, to make their infrastructures and processes more agile, and support greater flexibility, the company works hard to make sure it is ahead in this field.

The company embarked on its flexible working transformation strategy four to five years ago, led by HR challenges. Karl Deacon, CTO for Outsourcing Services at Capgemini UK, believes this is quite common - that the call for flexible working begins as a drive to cut costs or address skills shortages.

Capgemini quickly realised that there were far greater benefits to be enjoyed. Since starting on this path, it has closed a 2,000-seat office in central London and one of two sites in Woking, creating a desk-to-people ratio of 1:10 across the UK business. The nine people who aren't at a desk are likely to be at home, with clients, or in another office, Deacon explains.

"When we were researching employees' needs, we asked what they needed to do their jobs. We found that most people, ideally, were rarely at their desks."

With greater scope for interacting with the corporate network remotely, staff found they could get far more from their working day, he explains: "picking up their voicemail and email before dropping the kids at school, then heading straight to a client, working a bit while waiting in reception, and so on."

The sort of benefits a business would expect from mobilising the workforce and extending network access. But Capgemini's plans are much grander, and have not been without challenges.

Deacon lists three main ones: complexity; continuity; and cost.

"Organisations are so entrenched in existing business processes and infrastructure that it's hard to break free," he explains, relating to the first point. "With traditional architectures, making the change can be so complex and evolutionary that it's like painting the Forth Bridge - by the time you've finished, you need to start again."

This ties into continuity, too. "There are so many technologies and ways you could use them, and this is affected by the different geographies, so even if you crack flexible working in one region, it may be tough to expand the strategy globally," he says. "WiMax may work well in some areas, and high return-to-work rates after pregnancy may be great in the UK, but it gets harder as you try to replicate that around the world."

Meanwhile, cost will always be a factor. Often the driver for flexible working will be to get rid of buildings or re-use office space more creatively, and the resulting savings can help to justify the investment in change, but successful projects look far beyond this, to making better use of people's time. "BT is fantastic at this," Deacon notes.

At Capgemini, new mothers can now return to work, fulfil their obligations from home during school hours, and then log on again after 8pm, so they are still working full time if they want to. This is great for the employees concerned, and also highly beneficial to Capgemini, whose business is now covered for additional hours of the day without having to take the work offshore. (While Capgemini harnesses the offshore model quite extensively to deliver cost-efficiencies to its customers, the firm is excited about the potential to extend the working day affordably on domestic territory, or to re-deploy staff whose work may have been moved overseas.)

"The flipside of the focus on costs is the opportunities all of this creates," Deacon explains.

As an IT services supplier, Capgemini benefits from having HR and a whole host of IT services people all on the same management team. "This naturally forces our thinking," he says. "The key to governance is to make sure you involve technology, business process and HR people in the same conversations, and that P& L [finance] issues are also covered."

This also creates scope for regular reviews, taking in feedback from across the global organisation. "It's important that we allow business control over what gets implemented and where," Deacon notes. "This is about facilitating flexibility and providing guidance and best practice, without imposing anything. This has to be about the business and the customer as much as about the individual."

So how much of a headache has it been to get the technology right?

"Once you get over the first hurdles, it gets easier," Deacon says. "The next challenge for us is WiMax and technology convergence, and personalising the user experience," he notes. This goes beyond enabling workers to access all content and services from a single device, to personalising processes for different roles. "That's hard today, but if we didn't have to worry about the location, connectivity protocols and device being used by an individual, it would be much easier to customise the user experience."

He argues, too, that, while organisations might make great use of designated flexible working solutions such as Citrix, or Vodafone 3G cards, there is a case for harnessing more widespread technologies such as consumer email and online CRM systems to include team members that may otherwise drop out of the loop.

This was the thinking behind Capgemini's applications integration partnership with Google, Deacon explains. "Many companies, for example in the manufacturing, distribution and logistics business, have a lot of disenfranchised employees. These might not get the CEO's video-stream or the emails about policy change. There is a case for using some of the very prevalent, useful and cheap technologies that are already out there to form tighter connections with these employees. Software as a service and Google and Yahoo applications solve problems from a user's perspective rather than a corporate standpoint and, as such, are very important."

As Cagemini's plans progress, future thinking surrounds new practices the firm could adopt if it had no restrictions, Deacon concludes. "We know how to attract Generation X and Y people with the right tools and facilities [Google Apps, wikis and blogs], and are rolling all of that out. But now the challenge is, with this mobile skillset we now have, what could we do differently to exploit this for growth?"

When the London Borough of Barnet Council decided to take its flexible working initiative up a gear two to three years ago, it had to make absolutely sure its practices were watertight, particularly in the light of the sensitive Government data losses that have titillated the media in recent months.

'Significant' economic drivers provided the initial impetus for the strategy (specifically the need to reduce spend on office premises), which dovetailed neatly with public sector aims to get out and about, meeting local citizens instead of hiding behind desks. The borough was also struggling to attract employees in certain departments.

Technology-wise, the council quickly realised that a quick fix would not serve any purpose, particularly with security pressures. "We didn't want to embark on a series of window-dressing pilots," says Nick Walkley, executive director of resources at the Council. "This had to be part of the core infrastructure and support arrangements."

With this in mind, it outsourced the technology project to an external provider, 2e2, which has refreshed the council's infrastructure including the LAN, WAN, deploying IP telephony and an IP contact centre, WiFi, storage, backup, Citrix, Active Directory and MS Exchange. 2e2 now has an onsite managed service team, which runs and maintains everything.

The council also deferred to 2e2 for help in aligning its business objectives to fully embrace hot-desking and home working.

Walkley engaged HR, Health & Safety and the trade unions in detailed pilot work, to ensure the right policies were put in place. "We did an extensive pilot with 30 people in the Housing Benefits department, looking at where staff would work, the tools they would use, and the comfort of their working environment," Walkley explains. "We didn't assess the whole organisation; we felt that if this pilot worked it would proved a good foundation for replication elsewhere."

A key objective of the pilot was to demonstrate to the council as a whole, and particularly managers, what was possible. "This gave everyone confidence, and created buy-in," Walkley notes. Yet, equally, flexibility had to be built into the strategy. "A one-size-fits-all approach would not have worked," he says. "We didn't want home workers to be saddled with all the burdens of the desk."

Fast-forward to today, and Barnet has some 900 staff using Citrix to work at home or from a variety of other locations, including hot-desking facilities in local libraries.

At the beginning of the process, the council operated from nine buildings; now it is down to two and the aim is to reduce this to a single premises within the next 18 months. "We're making better use of our accommodation all the time and are introducing Table PCs and taking away desks every day," Walkley says, noting that the borough has made multi-million-pound savings already. Indeed, Barnet now boasts the lowest back-office costs of all of the London boroughs.

A primary challenge, however, has been changing the management approach. This has demanded coaching and development to equip managers with the softer skills they need if they are only seeing their social workers for three hours a week. "You can no longer make them turn up at 9am and point the finger," he notes. "This is still an issue for some middle managers, who need to take a different approach to performance measurement. We tell them that flexible working is not anarchic working; there is still a contract of employment!"

To tackle the problem, managers are encouraged to schedule supervision, there are designated team-working hours, and the council has been investing in electronic document and records management and an intranet upgrade, to make it easier for dispersed colleagues to collaborate and share experience.

Looking after staff to ensure they don't feel isolated is also a priority, as is demonstrating and communicating the benefits of flexible working to everyone. This includes workers who have no choice but to remain in the office.

"To make sure they don't feel abandoned or left out, we have changed their environments too, by giving them bigger, better offices, with more storage," Walkley says. "If we didn't pay them equal attention, we'd soon develop two cultures."

Walkley is pleased with the results so far. Morale is higher, and time lost to sickness has fallen from nine days to six. Older staff have reacted favourably too. "We've succeeded in getting the message across that we're helping them in their jobs, rather than simply cutting back," he says. "The people at the front line are not hugely well paid, and many are carers or have children. 9-5 employment doesn't suit them. Give them flexible working, and suddenly the sickness problem fades away and productivity improves."

The real proof of the pudding will be if the council manages to tackle the skills problem in its planning department. "We could transform this profession; that's our next challenge," Walkley says.

Karen Stanton, CIO at Kings College London, is just a year into the institution's flexible working strategy, but has big ambitions.

Stanton took up the role in January 2007, from a similar position at Nottingham University. Kings College, which is split across nine schools, is one of the top research-led institutions in the UK, and ranked in the top 25 in the world in a recent league table. Stanton's brief is to break down organisational boundaries to make it easier than ever for academics and students alike to benefit from the vast resources Kings has to offer.

The College's current principal, who has been there for three years, has set out a 10-year plan for transforming its research, teaching and professional services. A key focus is raising Kings' profile internationally, and attracting more students from overseas.

Connected Campus is an extensive three-year programme within this greater plan, to bring all of ISS's technological and information initiatives into alignment and to enable consistent access to resources, content, communication and other services online. The College is allocating £10m a year for the next three years to the programme.

Priorities include a new VPN, comprehensive wireless, and 24/7 access to a consistent portfolio of software applications and services, regardless of location, hardware or operating system. A student desktop is designated for rollout by this September, and a desktop for professional services staff over the summer. A 'Manage Data Once' project, meanwhile, aims to provide a single, centralised for College and student data store to minimise data loss and enable staff and students to manage and retrieve their data quickly and efficiently, wherever they happen to be.

Technology-wise, this requires a massive transformation of a big legacy infrastructure into a 21st century architecture, Stanton says. For Kings, this means taking extensive advice and thought leadership from external IT providers, most notably Getronics which specialises in flexible working. "Higher education has a track record for inventing its own practices, so this is a big change for us," she notes.

Taking a central, College-wide approach to IT and processes is a big departure, too. "But the biggest challenge will be the cultural shift we're going to have to make," she says.

Getting the academics on side demands a significant proportion of Stanton's time, which is spent articulating the benefits to staff, and listening to their concerns. "This is very challenging as we cover a whole breadth of disciplines, from the Classics, English and history to dentistry. A huge part of my role is supporting the colleges. Inevitably, this involves a lot of negotiation and compromise, as we have a finite budget," she says.

The best outcome is when she finds champions - academics who buy into the strategy and will enthuse happily about how centralised, standardised processes and flexible access to resources have transformed their research.

"There is a whole range of hurdles," she notes, not least the generational challenge where older managers may be sceptical about how IT can help improve processes, especially if it is seen to remove the personal elements. "Behind this, there are usually insecurities about their own skillsets," Stanton notes. "70% may not know what instant messaging is, for example. We need to translate that for them into benefits they can relate to. There is a big training and support element to all of this."

Achieving early wins will be important, too. "We need credibility from the first year, which is hard when our job is to run the existing systems at the same time as rolling out the new capabilities. Best practices are all around communication and engagement, at every step of the way. It's important to be realistic and honest when creating expectations for delivery, and about any hurdles or problems. Transparency is very important."