Bradlee Allen, Fuze

With fewer people commuting to a traditional office every day of the week, how should you re-evaluate productivity? As we bear witness to a multi-generational workforce consisting of employees that define productivity differently, the digital workplace must continue to move from being an idea to becoming a reality. In this session, Bradlee highlighted Fuze's latest research on 6,600 workers around the globe and discussed the opportunities and challenges businesses face when adopting new tools to support an increasingly digital and mobile workforce.

The importance of flexible working

Bradlee opened the session by looking back to his early career when he was armed with a ‘CVO router, Blackberry, laptop and told to go and be productive'. This will likely have been a common practice for those early adopters of flexible working. He went on to explain the importance of working in a way that's best for you, the device that allowed him to work in the most productive way was his iPhone. His trusty iPhone was what he was familiar with and allowed him to get results in the way that suited him best. He went on to link this example to the importance of ‘allowing young people to use flexible cloud based tech in order to achieve the best results, by putting up barriers with traditional tech that may not suit individual needs, you are making them counter-productive, enable working anywhere!'

Ultimately he advised these practices ‘push staff away and lower retention rates.' This was highlighted by their work with FL Smidth, the task Fuze had was to enable 11,000 employees in 107 locations, across 54 countries to adopt flexible working and consolidate tech. He asked for a show of hands to highlight the number of collaborative platforms the audiance used, the general consensus was that people were using many, when they could easily just be using one, which ultimately impacts productivity and creates barriers.

The flexible workplace of the future

The research undertaken by Fuze shows that 79% of app generation teens would like to work flexibly and 95% of workers like the idea of flexible working. Yet only 38% currently do, this shows the huge demand and possible gains from better motivation and inevitably better performance at work, when considering adopting this working practice and the associated technology.