3 posts tagged workflex

The first week in May is Flexible Work Arrangement week, promoting experimentation with rearranged work schedules and locations outside of the conventional office setting.

To celebrate, members of the FlexPaths team offer their ideas for flexing your work arrangements this week.  We hope that these will inspire you to embrace flexible work this week if you don’t already.  And if you are already a flexible worker?  We hope you’ll take the opportunity to encourage others to flex their work this week, as well.

  Meryl Rosenthal, CEO:

Encourage managers to extend on site coverage of their teams while promoting flex work. Every Friday, have team members decide if they want to start two hours earlier or later to avoid peak commute times. Promote it as a win win for the company and its customers.

  Clare Flynn Levy, Managing Director, UK:

Ask your team to each spend an hour thinking about what their ideal work arrangement would actually be, assuming that their role didn’t change, but if “face time” wasn’t an issue and/or there was no concern about career progression being jeopardized.  How would their work be affected? How would the team be affected? Then sit down, as a team, and spend an hour reviewing them together. Are any of the “ideal world” scenarios actually both possible and win-win for the team member and the company? If so, why not give them a shot?

  Sandy Burud, PhD, Principal:

Pick some jobs that seem ‘inflexible’, like administrative assistant positions — and think about how they can be restructured to make more flexibility possible.  Better yet, have the people in those jobs – not just the individual, but the team as a whole — think about how to use technology, restructure responsibilities and how to collaborate in new ways, to allow for flexible scheduling and remote work.  The process itself – besides leading to good ideas – helps the whole team buy in to the solution.

  Meryl Rosenthal, CEO:

Be proactive.. If you have an employee who you believe can work well in a flex arrangement and it will be a win-win for him/her and the business, suggest it. The increased productivity, engagement and simply goodwill will be well worth it.

  Karol Rose, Principal:

Try a flex simulation as a way to help managers and employees get comfortable with managing/working remotely. Invite employees who would like to work remotely some or all of the time and their managers to participate in a remote work simulation where they work away from each other in another part of the building or different office for one month. The ‘rule’ is  they cannot have ‘face time’ during this period. Managers need to provide guidance about deliverables and performance without seeing their employees. Employees need to decide what kind of support they need and how best to do their jobs without the usual office resources. Both need to figure out what’s required to make remote work a success in terms of technology and business ‘etiquette’ for things like meetings, client or co-worker needs, etc. They should debrief during the month to determine what’s working and what needs to be fixed. The simulation is a way to practice remote work before committing to doing it all or some of the time.

  Kelly Gouteix, Sales:

Flexibility doesn’t have to be an “all or nothing” proposition. Sometimes just working flexibly once or twice a week might be all that you need. With a strong action plan in place for how you will get your work done, you can reassure your manager that you’ve thought through the company’s best interests as well as your own.

  Meryl Rosenthal, CEO:

Attention all CEOs. We just had ‘Take Your  Sons & Daughters To Work Day’. Follow that up by encouraging parents to visit their child(ren)’s school so the experience can be shared in the classroom and have the parents use the rest of the day to work offsite. Have them share the experience with you.

  Robin Roschke, COO:

We know you want to flex … but cross the chasm and improve productivity through flexible work.  Start by test driving your company’s tools. Here are some ideas:

•  Set aside a half of day and declare NO emails unless you need to send an attachment.  Want to reach a colleague?  Send an IM.
•  Schedule a meeting- a VIRTUAL one….insist that everyone be in a different location and turn the video webcam on; share a document and collaborate in real time.
• Got wikis? Identify a topic that you want the team’s weigh in and capture it via online discussion threads, encourage folks to tag their content too!

  Jessica Smith, Marketing:

Try rearranging your schedule to avoid the longer commute times.   Arrive 1-2 hours earlier and leave 1-2 hours earlier.  If you have a meeting later in the day, try calling in during your commute home (using a hands-free device) or video conference once you’re home.

Traditionally, writing a resume was construed as crafting a rather dull ‘summary’ of where you have worked, and when, what titles you held, a few lists of what ‘responsibilities’ you were accountable for and perhaps a battery of bullets wrapped in percentages or dollar signs that assert what you achieved.

As a writing major in college more than a dozen years ago, I recall a technical writing course assignment to design my own resume. Even back then, immersed in the most creative environment, surrounded by aspiring writers, journalists and poets, I developed the most boring, unoriginal resume document. This anemic body of words would have left the reader uninspired, I’m sure.

Fast-forward more than a few years, and you can now find me crafting elegant, strategic and some might say exhilarating career resume stories that hook the readers and coerce them into action to ‘call the candidate in for an interview.’

Conventional or ‘Flexible’ Job Seeker, the Resume Goal is Selling Your Value.

So, whether you are a conventional job seeker aspiring to a role in a corporate, 9-to-5 environment or you are following a more flexible work path that facilitates diverse hours, an office at home, a compressed work week and/or job sharing, you should laser-focus your efforts on assertively and compellingly selling your value to the audience’s needs!

As in any sales initiative, you must drill down and really ‘listen’ to what they are saying their pain points are, and then persuade them that you can assuage their ailments.

First, table your aspirations for a flexible schedule for a bit, and focus solely on the company’s needs. For example, is competition stiff, and their share of the market in jeopardy? If so, then you must think of how you, specifically, will help them raise market share numbers. Or, perhaps they are growing at such a rapid rate, their area of pain is meeting market demand. Then, you must show how you can step in ‘running’ and take care of operational, customer service, production, and/or other needs that would help them maintain a positive reputation as a company who delivers on time, and with quality products or services.

You get the drift.

Flesh Out Your Success Stories, Exhibiting Confidence in a Flexible Environment

Now, flesh out your success stories, carving challenges you faced with people, processes, internal/external forces, etc., the action steps you took to meet those challenges, and the results you secured. When ferreting out your stories, jot down key traits you employed that are intrinsic to successful flexible workers, like, ‘discipline, focus, organization, technology acumen, resourcefulness, delivering work on time, a strong work ethic and confidence in working within a less structured environment,’ among other traits.

Genuinely and colorfully weave those traits into your stories, punctuating then for the reader. Show (don’t just tell) how and why you integrated the traits of a flexible worker to achieve the department’s, division’s and/or company’s goals and objectives. Show how you grew revenues, boosted profits, shrunk expenses, improved efficiencies, helped innovate new products and so forth.

Sandwich in your flexible style with pragmatic, bottom-line outcomes to create a compelling resume that helps attract the types of work cultures and opportunities to which you aspire!

~~~~~

Guest blogger Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter is chief career writer and partner with CareerTrend.net. Collaborating with professionals in career transition, or those individuals who desire to ignite their existing careers, Jacqui is one of only 27 Master Resume Writers globally and holds a BA in writing. An intuitive researcher, she unearths clients’ compelling story details and applies an inventive approach to career positioning documents and social media profiles. Jacqui can be found blogging at the CareerTrend blog, or sharing careers and other talent-promotion and leadership-related musings via Twitter at @ValueIntoWords.

Interested in guest blogging on the work. smart. blog?  Get more information about submitting a guest blog post here.

Today two organizations, truly leaders in our space, will officially announce their partnership later this morning.  I’ve been asked to attend the press conference and I will be live tweeting from both the @FlexPaths and my personal Twitter account, @JessicaNow.  The hashtag to follow along is #workflex starting at 9:30am.

Don’t forget to follow @SHRM and @EllenGalinsky, President of FWI on Twitter as well.

This new, multi-year partnership, known as “Moving Work Forward”, will help transform workplaces by highlighting the importance of effective and flexible workplace strategies to the business bottom-line.

During the announcement this morning, leaders from the corporate world along with the military will be joining SHRM and FWI at the National Press Club.  There, they will provide their points of view on workplace flexibility and how it has been successful at their organizations.

Military and business leaders we can expect to hear from include:

•         Henry G. Jackson, Interim President and CEO, SHRM
•         Ellen Galinsky, President, FWI
•         Sharon Allen, Chairman of the Board, Deloitte LLP
•         G. Brint Ryan, CEO, Ryan Inc.
•         Ted Childs, Jr., Principal of Ted Childs LLC, Board Member of FWI
•         Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

At FlexPaths, we’re extremely excited about this partnership because it reinforces the value that flexible work practices add to an organization’s overall success .  We’ve seen this first hand with our own clients as they reduce overhead costs and increase productivity all while empowering and retaining top talent.