South Africa slow to adopt worker mobility concept

25.07.2005
Von Nicolas Callegari

?If I cannot see you, you are not working.? This popular middle-management mind-set is not only counter-productive, but can end up costing a business time and money, says Citrix. The access technology vendor has been hard at work pushing the concept of flexible working and, at last week?s iForum conference, held a round table discussion on this concept.

?Flexible working,? says Citrix MD, Chris Norton, ?is the next phase of mobility?s evolution, going further than just making tactical point solutions available to a mobile workforce, but promoting productivity overall.?

The idea of flexible working is not a new one, but until now, technology and legislation have been the main inhibitors.

However, Norton maintains that with the technologies available in SA today, ?as long as there is access to an Internet connection, you can have access to your enterprise,? he says.

Lewis Gee, Citrix area vice president for U.K., Ireland and SA, adds that flexible working is no longer about IT. ?In fact, it has little to do with technology. It is the people behind the enterprise and the culture that are now the main inhibitors,? he says.

Technology, he maintains, is merely the tool to enable flexible working. And while enterprises will look for excuses to hold on to their money (of which there is a surprising amount in this country), the arguments about lack of broadband access, for example, are nothing but excuses, he says.

The concept is taking off overseas, Citrix says, to the extent that U.S. companies are not investing in their own office equipment, but rather paying employees an allowance to use their own equipment at home.

In some instances, flexible working is being seen as a drawcard for potential employment. But a lack of labor legislation that could facilitate flexible working in SA adds to the need for a mind-shift to acceptance of the concept.

?British Telecom (BT), for example,? Gee says, ?gave employees the choice to be flexible, and saw a staggering 99 percent return-to-work rate after maternity leave (out of a U.K. average of around 50 percent), which reduced the need for the company to find and train replacements.?

The local mind-set, however, is that work is somewhere you have to be, not something that you have to do, and the need is to move more towards an outcomes-based evaluation of workers, as opposed to how many people actually report to middle management.

In a recent survey in SA on flexible working by independent research house, Coleman Parks, both top management and employees indicated a willingness to adopt flexible working policies.

Reasons include the fact that it could improve the productivity of working parents, people with disabilities, and even those who are located far from their place of employment.

?If management adopts measurement based on deliverable performance, rather than time-and-attendance, employees are made responsible for their outputs and this also aims to instil feelings of trust between employer and employee, which has positive knock-on effects for an organization,? Norton says.

For most SA employers, this looks like a far cry from reality. But it will catch on when the stumbling blocks of culture and skills have been overcome, concludes BMI-T director, Mark Walker.