Summary of Research Report

The research shows that people working at Microsoft would like to have the
opportunity to work flexibly at least on occasion. This counts especially for man.
The flexibility program is already applied and used in Europe and the leaders of
flexibility are Austria, Denmark and Sweden.
The importance of flexibility is mostly coming from causes as caring for children
under five, school kids and pets. Another cause is that the office workers, are
under pressure at least on occasion to not work late, and yet eight in ten do work
some overtime. Besides that, most of the employees think that their lives would
be better if they could work more flexibly and would choose a mixture of
working in the office. They say that they would also be away from it in an ideal
world. Almost half of the respondents think flexible working would be at least
very important to any decision they would make about changing job. Half of the
flexible workers believe they work more productively away from the office, and
the other half says this is because they can fit their work around personal
commitments. Three in ten of the office workers are actually the most productive
at home.  So therefore, whether it being flexible in regard to place or time of
work, there are strong indications that employers can improve the productivity
of their employees by allowing them to work flexibly.
The difference between big and small companies is the attitude to flexible
working. At a small company employees work far more flexible than big
companies. And small organisations also have more support in place and the
right policy.
More than one third of the respondents have never worked away from the office.
But since more than a half of the of European businesses allow staff to work
flexibly but just less than one-third of businesses across Europe provide
corporate guidelines on flexible work, this could be a barrier to change to the
new flexible working. Plus almost half of the respondents don’t fully trust their
colleagues to work productively away from the office.
The role of the IT department could be the reason why 68% of employees who
work overtime each week, do so from the office. And the reason why 43% of all
office workers and one-third of those working for a large enterprise use either a
personal laptop or mobile device for email access. Because 1 of the 5 employees
find there already over-stretched IT team “very helpful” in providing technology
support for flexible working. This combined with the results that more than half
of respondents lack access to a company laptop or mobile email device to help
them when working flexibly. As organisations increase in size, more respondents
want improved software which mirrors their work PC and systems
Personally I learned that these new methods of flexibility working are more in
use than I was aware of. Besides that I realised the impact of the quality of the IT
services has so much impact. And what surprises me was that small businesses
are more make use of this system.
Helpful information for the project could be that locations also have his
preferences in this environment. So since everyone is more and more away form
the office but everywhere else, let co-workers not only choice between date and
time, but create an option in location together with date and time.