The Smart Working Revolution - Guest Article by Ruth Gawthorpe
Ever heard of the Smart Working Revolution? No? As the CEO of the Smart Working Revolution and a passionate advocate for making 
smart working work for everyone, I have been a huge advocate of this for many years. I first dipped my toes into smart working as an HR Director and piloted an employee gym membership scheme to match a dip in demand between 12 noon and 2 pm in a contact centre.
In my experience, the positive impact of doing so was far greater than any of the leadership team could have imagined. “Not only did productivity improve and the physical health of employees increase, but so did levels of teamwork and sales”. The reduction in staff absence made the pilot financially beneficial for the entire business, too.
It was from this pinnacle moment, 20 years ago, that I began to explore the other ways in which businesses can adopt a smarter working approach, and thus, my Smart Working Revolution was born!
So what is smart working? It is a “business wisdom” which champions lots of different ways of working. This includes the most commonly known ones, such as: flexible working, part-time hours, job sharing and working from home. But, surprisingly, there are 50 other ways of doing it too. Including many, we hadn’t thought of!
Smart working is essentially encouraging a working culture which allows greater flexibility on aspects such as location, contract hours and perceived incentives or a combination of all these things.
The logical argument for allowing this flexibility is that there are benefits for both the employer and employee; employers have workers that work the same number of hours but are less stressed and, therefore, are more productive for the business; employees are less stressed and have greater job satisfaction, which positively influences health and wellbeing and the service to the customer.
There are obvious pitfalls, pros and cons to smart working and it will be interesting to see over the next 10 years how the conversation develops and if environmental concerns with travel will add more fire to fuel the debate. After all, “work happens in brains, not offices”.
Ruth Gawthorpe is CEO of the Smart Working Revolution who support Thoughtful Leaders who want to attract and retain the most talented people. Ruth is leading the Ashley Kate HR & Finance HR Directors Boardroom event on this very subject, in Nottingham on the 7th November
www.smartworkingrevolution.com
