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Weekly UpdatesTo manage office areas more strategically, benchmarking data relating flexible working should be regularly prepared, collected, and monitored. Theoretically, previous Government reports and research indicate that the performance benchmarks are important for managing a flexible working environment. An organisation aiming to adopt flexible working should begin to seriously prepare and maintain such data.
Employing the principles of commercial workspace management to the public offices may not be always applicable in practice. Portfolio flexibility providing multi-levels of utilisation is not being promoted in SLAB at present. This may imply some restrictions of public organisation, in terms of regulation, legislation, and working culture. To assist the public offices like SLAB in taking-up of flexible working more effectively, the models of current commercial workspace management concept should be adapted. The proposed option is a combined resource management strategy. The concept is based on the current survey results and the workspace/portfolio flexibility models. The combined resource management of three components, ICT, HR, and workspace management, may lead SLAB to gain a clearer picture of flexible working in practice. The model also creates an opportunity to evaluate flexible working strategy in financial and economics terms for both short- and long-term implementation periods.
There is evidence from the current research to confirm that flexible working can be a tool for managing office resource. Promoting the right activity-based working area and appropriate workspace flexibility to the property may help an organisation to achieve the successful adoption of flexible working. Beside, the flexible working concept can assist both the individual and the organisation to achieve benefits, including balancing work and family life and effective resource management.
8. LIMITATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
As a result of a limited sample size, the research results must be treated with some caution. However, even though based on a small sample size, the outcomes do provide some valid insights into the characteristics of SLAB and their attitudes to adoption of flexible working practices. Although it is not possible to generalise the results to other types of organisations, the research insights may be tentatively applied to a particular organisation if it has similar characteristics to the SLA sample.
Key implications on financial and economic perspectives of flexible working adoption are unable to be investigated at this stage because the benchmarking information relating to flexible working is rarely prepared and provided by the staff of SLAB. Although previous research may state that flexible working benefits an organisation to achieve more effective resource management, no evidence in the current research confirms that the higher flexible working stage always provide the lower total cost of implementation. Therefore, a crucial task for future research is to investigate the relationship of the flexible working stage and performance benchmarks. The relationship will provide important investment information to senior management for making the take-up decision. In addition, financial and economic appraisal of flexible working should be reviewed before taking-up in practice. To achieve this, some methods, such as Whole-Life Costing or Cost Benefit Analysis, could be employed to investigate this proposal. The possible outcomes may also include Value for Money (VFM) of flexible working in each evaluation stage.
Received 31 March 2008; accepted 12 June 2008
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Thadsin KHAMKANYA (1) and Brian SLOAN (2) ([mail])
(1) School of Engineering and the Built Environment, Napier University, 10 Colinton Road, Edinburgh, Scotland EH10 5DT, UK E-mail: t.khamkanya@napier.ac.uk
(2) School of Engineering and the Built Environment, Napier University, 10 Colinton Road, Edinburgh, Scotland EH10 5DT, UK E-mail: B.Sloan@napier.ac.uk
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