How ready is your business for the flexible working trend? Here's our guide to making it work for you. From saving money to increasing productivity, if you do it right it can have amazing benefits for you and your employees, as we've been learning from our flexible working experiment.

1. How to make
flexible working
work for you

2. We know it works.
Because we’ve done it.
In February 2012, we started our flexible working journey.
We closed our HQ and 2500 people worked away for the day.
In one day that meant:
A saving of 3000 commuting hours
A cut in CO2 emissions of 25,000 tonnes
1/3 of our people reporting they were more productive

3. And we’re still benefiting
As more and more of our people are now working flexibly:
•We saved more than £3.8 million a year because
we now need 500 fewer desks
•We expect to spend 30% less on paper
•We expect to save £600,000 a year on travel costs
and 1272 days in travel time

4. Make it work for
your people
You’ll need to change the way you work,
not just your technology and policies.

5. …because your people come in
two flavours
Desk huggers – who must have their own desk
Desk hoppers – who are happy to move around
So an early thing you can do is identify how many
of each you have in your organisation.

6. …so help them by
Running training sessions for collaboration
tools like Microsoft Lync
Publishing a quick FAQ guide, to save your
helpdesk getting jammed up
Not expecting behaviours to change
overnight, but being ready for when they do
Keeping them updated through your intranet,
email or social media
Inviting questions and answering them quickly

7. …and trust them
So don’t clock watch
They’re not machines
And measure outcomes, not attendance
Your people don’t need to be at the office late
to get the work done
64% of our employees say
they’re more productive

8. Prepare your technology…
… so your network has the bandwidth for peak times
… so everyone has a connection at home or elsewhere
… so the devices you use are secure

9. Follow your leaders
Change is successful when it comes from the top...
... So turn your department heads into flexible working advocates

10. Make it work for
the environment
In one month alone, we saved 100,000commuter miles.
In one day, we cut CO2 emissions by 25,000tonnes

11. Happier people,
healthier environment
business travel
office-bound workers
office overheads
Since February 2012 we’ve had over 4000 flexible working
days, resulting in 250-300 fewer cars at the office.

12. Seeing is believing
Here’s what we did and why we did it . . .

13. It’s not just about machines
and policies
Things to consider...
It’s about changing the way
you work
Help your people with training
and information
Trust your people to do
the right thing
Prepare your technology
Get your leadership to drive
flexible working
If you want to discover more visit
o2.co.uk/enterprise or follow us
@O2BusinessUK