Gas Prices & Employee Productivity on the Rise
The rising cost of gas lays heavy on the minds and wallets of every employee. The issue comes up in conversations on elevators and in lunchrooms all across Corporate America. In response, more companies, including my own, are offering their employees the option of telecommuting at least one day a week if not permanently. And, recently, Chicago-based software firm, 37signals, implemented a four day work week by eliminating Friday as a workday, following the suit of other companies such as American Express and even municipalities such as the entire city of Birmingham, Alabama and The State of Utah.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas' List of Top 10 Workforce Trends of the Future, includes the four-day workweek as the new corporate standard. “The idea of a set workday or a five-day workweek doesn’t make sense,” says John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “It’s not about the time you put in. It’s about the work you do.”
The Very Bright Up Side of the soaring energy costs is that is comes alongside the emergence of Generation Y into the workforce and both are simutaneously Revolutionizing the Workforce and how we view and measure employee productivity. In a study on the effect of telecommuting on productivity published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, lead author Ravi S. Gajendran says “Our results show that telecommuting has an overall beneficial effect because the arrangement provides employees with more control over how they do their work. Autonomy is a major factor in worker satisfaction and this rings true in our analysis. We found that telecommuters reported more job satisfaction, less motivation to leave the company, less stress, improved work-family balance, and higher performance ratings by supervisors.”
BTW: You can read a story of one of our own employee's success with telecommuting on TheLedger.com
Best Buy has implemented the Results-Only Work Environment or ROWE where they've done away with the normal corporate restrictions such as keeping regular hours and even coming into the office every morning. "In the standard corporate work environment, you have to put in face time because that's how you show your commitment to the organization and your level of dedication," says Steve Hance, Best Buy employee relations manager. "When you come into the office, you've got to make sure you're always seen by the right people. That becomes the goal, rather than actually getting things done. With ROWE, all those little rules that we've grown used to living by are out the door. Instead, the work itself is the only thing that matters." So now employees can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.
Here's a quick video on how the Results-Only Work Environment achieves the optimal Work/Life Balance for Employees and Changes the mindset of an Entire Organization
