Publications
Partners
- Employers are competing to retain top talent.
- Intangible benefits such as flexibility are important to keep employees.
- There are productivity and retention benefits to the offer of workplace flexibility.
- For more stories, visit the Tech and Trends homepage.
Increasing employees' pay is no longer enough to retain top talent. Instead, employers need to prioritise intangible benefits, like flexibility, to remain competitive.
This was the view of Sudhish Mohan, chief information officer (CIO) at Old Mutual, who spoke at the IDC CIO summit last week.
Mohan said employee retention was much cheaper than recruitment and pointed out that there was a lot of movement of staff between top companies: "We are all stealing from each other and it's just a horrible place to be."
His view was that intangible benefits, such as flexible working conditions, were essential to incentivise employees, especially younger age cohorts, to stay with the company.
Clover CIO Tsholofelo Moeca echoed this.
He said that the secret to retaining top talent and boosting the productivity of workers was designing a human-centric workplace with flexible working conditions for information workers.
Companies should trust the data and not their gut when it comes to the benefits of providing flexibility to their employees, he added.
He said:
Moeca cited research that showed that providing workers with autonomy over how to schedule their time makes them 2.3 times more likely to perform better at work and makes employees 2.3 times more likely to report that they intend to stay at their current place of employment.
He said that flexibility may take many forms, but the best results are achieved by providing workers with full autonomy to structure their working conditions so long as there are certain guard rails that employers put up.
"What's important with the flexibility options is the guard rails that you put around it. To say these are the rules you must play within. A common one is to say you must put the best interests of the company first in your flexibility. Or you must put the team first in your flexibility. And then the rest you can take care of."
Not so fast
Despite the benefits of a flexible working environment, research by McKinsey and Company showed many executives want employees back in office owing to concerns about losing organisational structure and maintaining the culture of the organisation.
The research showed that executives realised that the period of time during which employees were forced to work from home was surprisingly effective, but still wanted to return to a work environment that was somewhat more flexible than the pre-pandemic work environment, but not dramatically different.
Moeca said there was an opportunity for companies to build a new culture that involves meeting more purposefully.
"Culture is a set of rituals. It's what you do every day that you guys agree on," he said.
He added:
He said that you can build a culture online while coming to the office for more purposeful things which need to be dealt with in person.
A moral conundrum?
Elon Musk recently told CNBC that he thinks working from home is morally wrong. He said that it is unfair to expect service workers to come into work in person while those who are able to work on laptops advocate for work-from-home policies.
"The laptop class is living in la-la land," he said.
Moeca said that while there may be some professional jealousy between workers who can and can't work from home, workers will generally understand that it comes with the territory.
At Clover, he said that there is no way that the people who make yogurt can work from home, but they get other benefits, such as reduced rates on products.
He said companies need to offer the employees that can work from home the option to do so in order to remain competitive.
"If you are not doing it then you are out of the game – critical skills are going to leave you."
