Employee experience | Productivity and the flexible workforce - Striking the Right Balance

By Neville Henderson - Crown Workforce Management, Senior Consultant

The world of work has undergone a sea-change in the past few years. Businesses want more flexibility and productivity to suit them. At the same time, some people want predictability and others want to decide when and where they work for themselves.

There was a time when people went to school, some went on to university, and when they managed to find employment they remained with their employer for many years. Some got promotions and stayed until receiving their gold watch and pension. This concept of a job for life now seems an anachronism. It is questionable whether in the future whether jobs as we know them will exist at all. Zero-hours contracts, part-time work, agency work, home working and the so-called ‘gig economy’ are blurring the definition. Recent court rulings have begun to understand these definitions, but we are still a long way off.

With the availability of software platforms and the upsurge of ‘big data’ artificial intelligence can not only predict demand but also verify it in real-time to show any productivity potential. By creating a flexible workforce, of whatever type of ‘worker’, businesses aim to better match this requirement.