Globally, many leading organizations have introduced workplace policies to enable flexible work, recognizing its benefits for staff retention, morale, commitment, diversity, recruitment, and being an employer of choice. But despite employee demand and some high-profile examples, it has proved harder to get broader adoption of those policies.
How We Nudged Employees to Embrace Flexible Work
Experiments from Australia show how small changes can help.
November 03, 2017
Chris Rogers/Getty Images
Summary.
Even in organizations that have adopted flexible workplace policies, it can be challenging to get people to actually take advantage of them. To explore this phenomenon, the authors conducted three experiments looking at the impact of a behavioral nudge on people’s actions. In the first intervention, the researchers condensed the default settings in Microsoft Outlook calendars so that people saw fewer hours available in calendars. In the second intervention, they shared entry card data with managers to show how closely their teams mimicked their starting and leaving behavior. Finally, they ran a competition among teams to see which had the highest rates of adoption of flexible working. They found that all three interventions had a measurable impact on employees’ utilization of flexible working policies, suggesting that these tactics could be effective in a variety of office environments.