Flex-office: Adapt your office to employee's top concern

How to adapt your company to employees' expectations in 2022?

Adapting the employee experience to their new expectations and prioritie is essential today to retain employees, attract new talent and guarantee productivity and well-being at work.

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What spaces and services are required?

A recent Harris Interactive study for Sodexo found that 52% of employees consider flexibility in terms of days, hours and location of work as their primary concern and they give it more more importance than traditional benefits such as meal vouchers or company health insurance coverage.

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This growing need for flexibility represents a major challenge for companies at several levels:

  • management, team management and working tools must be rethought and
  • the organization and layout of work spaces must now be adapted to the flex-office in order to accommodate alternating employees and optimize property management costs.

Why do employees need flexibility in their work ?

If flex office already existed in some companies before the pandemic, it is the successive confinements and the Covid-19 crisis that have definitely shaken up the world of work by bringing out this strong need for flexibility among employees.

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According to Leesman, a firm specializing in workplace studies, 85% of employees would prefer a mixed, hybrid work model that includes face-to-face days and at least two days of telework.

The reason why this hybrid work model is so sought after and favored by employees today is that they find many advantages in it. Among those mentioned, the main advantage is the saving of time.

The time that is not spent in transport or on the journey from home to the office can be devoted to their family, their hobbies, or to household tasks. This time saving contributes to a better work-life balance, a valuable balance that should be at the heart of your employee experience strategy.

How does Flex-office help your company's performance ?

As Ronni Schorr, global vice president of marketing at Circles, Sodexo's concierge service, reminds us : "Working is no longer about location, it's about work life”.

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By offering a flexible work experience, employees stay connected to each other, cultivate a sense of belonging to the company, while enjoying the work-life balance they seek. As a result, they are more loyal to the company and employee turnover and recruitment costs are reduced.

Thanks to this flexibility, employees are more productive, more proactive. They work according to the demands and needs of the customers and not according to the days and hours of work that had been defined.

Employees were willing to work overtime, shift work, and even weekends if customer demand required it, because they knew they didn't have to be at their desks by 8 a.m. on Monday.

Flex-office, hybrid work, how can companies transform their organization?

To enable your organization to manage the switch to traditional working way to flex-office, you need to think ahead and set limits in order to effectively manage office occupancy rates and anticipate employees' workspace needs, whether they are individual or collaborative.

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Yannick Villar, President and co-founder of Wx, reminds us that companies must be proactive in managing occupancy and the use of the workplace.

With workdays and work schedules varying from employee to employee, companies can't just be reactive to employee requests.

"If 600 people say they want to come into the office tomorrow and you only have space for 450, you're going to have choices to make,".

To succeed in your project to transform the way people work and improve the employee experience, companies and managers will have to set limits by determining the percentage of days in the office and the percentage of days each employee will work from home, while anticipating common days and times between teams working on common projects.

You want to be supported in your transition to flex-office ?

Wx advises you and provides you with the technological solutions necessary for the success of your project.