Flexible working is dangerous

A lot of people hail flexible working and the technology available these days to support it, whether that's broadband, wireless, blackberries etc., as the new nirvana. We get excited at the prospect of working out of our kitchen in Dorset or even on our veranda in Valletta, the freedom to sit in a cafe for some peace and quite... and God forbid, that our time on the commuter trains is actually considered as work time.

The problems for most businesses with all this (or certainly ones I think about) are...

• How do you move your approach to performance measurement from an input based one (where it's all about when people arrive and leave the office... yuck) to output based (which is the only way you can genuinely measure performance of smart home / flexible working knowledge teams)?
• How do you create, retain and build a culture of team-work when people rarely (or never) meet up? No matter what people say, face-to-face work and play time is fundamental to creating a deeper level of understanding, cooperation and teamwork.

To be honest, these are all things I believe are crackable and will share when we do.

What gets ignored the most is the actual danger of flexible working to us all. In a creative knowledge economy you not only need time for SLOW thinking... you need time for NO thinking. When you can log on and are contactable 24/7 365 days a year... how does that happen?

SELF DISCIPLINE is obviously the answer but in a society where that clearly isn't the trend (obesity, hours spent in front of the box, alcohol consumptions etc.) how realstic is it, or are all these devices simply the new chains of slavery?

As a boss, you may take the short term view and say "great... I can tell people the laptop and blackberry is for their benefit but actually... wink wink nudge nudge say no more". Watch out though... ignoring the issue is really dangerous... certainly in my mind. I think it's important to always try and treat everyone fairly and like mature responsible adults that have a choice of whether to stay with you or not, so it's a dilemna that occupies me (a lot). Why?... I guess it's the old "treat others as you'd like them to treat you" thing.

Even if you don't think that way as a manager... beware that in today's much more open knowledge-based world where great talent has genuine choices... they'll catch on, blog it and search out businesses that do. You're reputation is just a search away... and so is someone elses.

That's why, while I think it is important to try and enable people to do this, I'm also scratching my heads about how we can not just avoid the "simple" pitfalls but also ensure people develop the self discipline to switch off... so we can truly achieve nirvana.

Thoughts anyone?

And on that note, I'll now log off (it is a beautiful Saturday after all) and do some "no thinking".