Smart working - big savings

Flexible working is an opportunity to work differently, more effectively and leaner - and to make big savings by adopting a radically different approach. Achieving it across the organisation is a major leadership challenge. In short you need to think in a radically different way about how you work, then do it.

Flexible working means working from just about anywhere: on the move; at the office; at home; with a client or partner.  An immediate benefit of this is freeing up spending on maintaining or renting property that is underused. The potential savings are massive: research suggests most councils could occupy 30% less property than at present without impacting service delivery.

Despite this, there remain pockets  of resistance – typically managers  who can’t manage unless they are  breathing down the necks of their staff. For flexible working to succeed, managers need to manage their staff on the basis of results, and give them the tools necessary to achieve them.

At the same time the introduction of flexible working enables an organisation to consider doing things better by doing them differently. Flexible working is the opportunity to embrace unified communications - integrating email, SMS, Fax, voice, video, etc. into a single unified message store, accessible from a variety of different devices. It also has implications for security, business continuity and the green agenda.

How Socitm Consulting can help

• Home, mobile, flexible and smart working strategy development
• Maximising savings on the property portfolio and redesigning working environments
• HR considerations – preparing staff and managers for new ways of working and measuring performance
• Business process improvements with a focus on lean working
• Redesigning systems – including electronic document and records management and unified communications
• Information management considerations – including data quality, security, business continuity/disaster recovery and information assurance
• Benefits realisation

For more information see our pages on:

• Mobile and flexible working
• E-enablement and integration
• Recruitment support

And our briefings:

• Mobile working - the organisational challenges