The idea started from a simple premise: Could we give people more time back, create a
better employee experience, and still deliver the same or better outcomes for our
customers and the business?
For several employees, that answer was a resounding yes. However, as the experiment
matured, I started to see that what felt flexible to one employee was restrictive to another.
The reality is that people’s jobs and personal circumstances are different. Some
employees loved the four-day structure, and some still work that way today. For others,
having everybody work the same four days wasn’t particularly flexible at all.
As we listened to our people and looked at how different teams and roles operated, it
became apparent that the four-day workweek wasn’t working equally well for everyone.
We had changed the schedule, but we hadn’t necessarily created true flexibility. If I tell you
exactly when you have to be flexible, that’s not really flexibility. We’d replaced one
schedule with another.
When flexibility gets less flexible
The lesson wasn’t that the four-day workweek had failed. It was that we had been asking
the wrong question. Instead of focusing on how many days people should work, we needed
to focus on what each role actually needed to deliver.
That’s when we changed the question. Instead of asking, “What is the flexible working
model for Safeguard Global?” we started asking, “How much choice can we give each
person over how they work while still delivering what the business and our customers
need?” That shift led us to what I call “optionality.”
Optionality is the new flexibility
Optionality is about giving people more choice in how they structure their work rather than
replacing one company-wide schedule with another.
If someone can meet the expectations of their role in four days, that’s great. If a five-day
workweek is better, that option remains in place. The same philosophy applies to where
people work. We’re overwhelmingly remote, but we maintain offices and coworking
options for people who want or need them. The point isn’t to eliminate structure. It’s to give
employees as much choice as the work allows. The moment you prescribe exactly what
flexibility has to look like for everybody, you start taking the flexibility out of it.
However, optionality only works if you have accountability. And that accountability needs
to come from the top.
Giving choice without losing accountability
Flexibility only succeeds when people know exactly what they are accountable for. If a
manager has to rely on hours worked or physical presence to determine whether someone
is performing, the organization may not have defined the right measures of performance
clearly enough.
In our case, we knew leadership had to set the framework, so we went role by role and
defined what people need to accomplish to meet our goals. Instead of asking managers to
focus on hours worked, we asked them to focus on whether people were delivering the
outcomes their roles required.
For a customer-facing role, that might mean improving a key customer relationship,
reducing recurring issues or tickets, or improving customer sentiment. The specific metric
will differ by role, but the principle is the same: Measure the outcome that matters rather
than using time or physical presence as a proxy for performance.
That required a shift in my own thinking as a leader, too. Giving people greater freedom
doesn’t mean becoming less demanding. In some ways, it requires leaders to be more
disciplined because you have to articulate what success actually looks like. That’s a much
healthier management conversation than trying to dictate when someone needs to be in
front of their computer.
It comes down to being incredibly clear about the outcomes you expect and then trusting
people to determine for themselves the best way to deliver those outcomes for the
business and your customers.
Stop designing flexibility from the top down
Four-day weeks, hybrid schedules, and return-to-office policies can all fall into the same
trap: Leaders decide what the ideal working model looks like, then expect employees to fit
themselves into it.
Companies are still figuring out what the workplace of the future looks like. I don’t think
leaders are going to figure it out by trying to predict the next workplace trend. Our
experience taught me something more useful: be willing to test an idea, pay attention to
what actually happens and change course when the reality doesn’t match the theory.
As a CEO, I don’t consider changing an approach a failure. The failure would be sticking
with something simply because it was decided that was the answer. The workplace will
keep changing. Our job as leaders is to keep learning with it. That’s optionality.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
