Australians’ long commutes renew call for flexible working arrangements

The average Australian spends 27 minutes getting to work every day and they’re stressed, exhausted and certainly not ready to work by the time they get there, a new survey argues.

Experts say the survey suggests businesses should consider flexible working practices – including the possibility of working from home – in order to reduce the amount of stress and detractors from morale in the workplace.

“It depends on the business,” Skye Recruitment co-founder and chief executive Kye MacDonald says. “Our clients in the CBD tend to offer flexible arrangements for non-client facing staff, and it can definitely work.”

The latest Regus survey of 10,000 businesses worldwide found that not only does the average commuter spend nearly half an hour getting to work every day, but 17% spend over 45 minutes getting to their workplace and back.

Regus’ regional vice president for Australia and south-east Asia, William Willems, also points out in the report that commuters experience a variety of problems on their way to work – delays, dangerous drives, road rage and pollution.

As a result, Regus recommends businesses take on flexible working practices, “to avoid all these stresses and strains which can have such an adverse effect on employee’s motivation and happiness”.

“Travelling to a work location closer to home, especially outside of peak hours, is often the best way to avoid theses stresses for a happier, calmer and ultimately more fruitful days’ work.”

MacDonald says changing the hours employees start work can certainly help productivity.

“We have clients that tend to have people start work early in the morning, and then finish at three or four, so they’re avoiding the prime-time commute.”

“But it really depends on the industry you’re in. If you’re doing sales then it’s harder to have flexible work times because you’re so often working on different schedules.”

MacDonald says businesses can also improve workflow by having the whole workforce start at the one time – if people come in at different points in the morning they tend to interrupt the flow of the day.

“I’ve seen people have real management problems because the first batch gets in at 6.30, they sit around having a few minutes of a chat, then get to work. But then others come at 8.30, and the process starts again.”

“Then you have people leaving at 4pm, and they interrupt everyone as they leave. So the productivity in the office tends to die… not to say it can’t work, but it has challenges. If you’re going to have everyone avoid rush hour, it’d be advisable to have them at the same time.”

Willems agrees, saying that “being left in the dark about service interruptions or traffic jams is also a killer for the calm and productive working day”.

Clearswift regional director Phil Vasic says businesses should look at ways IT can help employees avoid the morning commute.

“A lot of our messaging on this topic has been that working from home is becoming more and more common – the line is becoming blurry in that regard.”

Vasic says that of the workers Clearswift surveyed last year, 47% said work and home lives were overlapping about four or five times a week – partly because of Web 2.0 tools such as DropBox becoming more popular.

But Vasic says if you’re going to allow employees to adopt a more flexible timetable in order to avoid commutes, then you need to create clear security policies about what they’re actually doing.

“What we would say from a security perspective is that it needs to be a combination of policy and technology to support this type of environment.”

Businesses will have critical data – they need to have access to data and that needs to be protected. So the policies need to be well communicated and articulated in these types of environments so that they maintain a security posture while having the flexible work arrangement.