Flex appeal
 | Workers still place a high value on flexibility, but do employers?

“Flexible working is the new norm.”

Or so we were told at the time. And back in 2019 IWG's Global Workspace Survey, polled over 15,000 business professionals across 80 countries and backed the claim. And this was a year before the pandemic changed everything.

According to the report, 75% of workers considered flexible working to be “the new normal,” and over four in five said they’d turn down a job that didn’t offer it. At the time, the appetite for change was so strong that the regular 9-to-5 was being described in the report as “about as relevant as a fax machine.”

Some 85% of respondents reported that their company was more productive due to flexible working, making a clear business case for it. Further, 77% believed it helped attract and retain talent. Even sectors rooted in the physical space like manufacturing and retail embraced elements of flexibility. By 2019, 62% of firms had already adopted flexible workspace policies.