“Travel chaos!” “Beat the Tube strike!” “London held to ransom!”
A few of the emotion-charged battle cries saturating the internet over the last couple of days during the ongoing strike. What if there was another way? An easier way that didn’t add hours to our commutes and kept us safe, warm and productive?
I live in Walthamstow (NE London) and rely pretty much entirely upon the Victoria Line for my commute to our office in Putney (SW London), so the Tube strike has made getting into work kind of a mission. The good news is that at Just:: we support flexible working for all employees, which has for obvious reasons come in especially handy during the strike. While other commuters were fighting through the maelstrom, I was online and productive.
Our use of technology at Just::, along with agency-wide cooperation, helps to make the option of working from home possible. We have laptops, webmail and diversion from desk phones to our mobiles so we’re fully contactable, and remote server access so we’re never without all the documents we need. We also use Skype and FaceTime for meetings. It’s good to know that if something happens to make my journey untenable, I’ve got the support to function 100% from home and won’t be letting down my colleagues or my clients.
It’s also really important that employees have the confidence to give flexible working a try. A while ago, we set aside a week when all members of staff were encouraged to work from home for one day. Being away from the office can run the risk of making people feel isolated from colleagues or even feel guilty for working from the comfort of their own sofa. However, by putting certain strategies in place, working from home is a totally legitimate, dynamic way of doing business, opening new possibilities for employees and helping to circumnavigate pesky public transport industrial action.
Being resolutely curious at Just::, we’re constantly reviewing the way we do things. Right now our flexible working policy is one area we’re looking at to see what’s going well and what we can do better. Using new technologies, like instant messaging to make communicating with colleagues who work remotely as easy and immediate as going over to speak to them at their desk, is just one improvement we’re looking to make. We’re ensuring the way we do flexible working reflects people’s preferences by using our Just:: Invent principles to collaborate agency-wide and gain input from everyone who stands to benefit, while identifying where the challenges lie when colleagues work remotely and how to help tackle these.
We’ll continue to ask the pertinent questions to make flexible working work for everyone, and would encourage employers and employees alike to explore the options available to keep people productive when unavoidable events like Tube strikes conspire against us humble commuters.