Millennials – Flexible Working Hours, a “Yay or a Nay” ?

There is a discussion out there whether flexible working hours makes sense or not for the employee and the company. Therefore, we have decided to do a research and this is what we found out.

According to Bentley University, 77% of Millennials (born between 1981 to 1997) prefer flexible working hours and believe that it is much more productive for them. Many would say, “oh well, they are just lazy...”, however that is not it, at all. Millennials are digitally advanced and comfortable with that, which allows them to work anywhere at any time. And the fact is that this generation will become and is already becoming the majority in the market place. It is predicted that by 2030, Millennials will “kick off” the working 9 to 5 thing, and quite contrary to what people imagine, it will be extremely beneficial for the worldwide economy and for organisations.

Here goes the reasoning behind this scenario:

It works well mainly with Millennials

This way of working doesn’t work well with other generations but it does with Millennials. The thing is, most people in other generations don’t have the same mind-set or the type of technological skills and attitude for this “way of working”, but the millennials are simply comfortable working this way. It’s the future and it is their way of living.

Merging personal life with work, peacefully

Millennials see working as an integral part of life on which one is passionate about, but at the same time they want to do it in a comfortable environment, merged with the community and their daily life. They literally bring the work home, without being a burden. Instead of detaching working life with personal, they attach it with ease. They will attend all family dinners, and all things necessary for their kids and if needed they'll work night hours, or very early in the morning (whatever is their peak time), or even a Saturday Morning or a Sunday afternoon. They don't bound themselves to a stagnant schedule, which makes them have a more entrepreneurial mind-set. The result is that normally their work will end up better, since they are working under low levels of stress and higher satisfaction rate. Many great researchers state that this can increase creativity and motivation to work more and accomplish better targets.

Continuing Skills Education

Millennials love to improve their skills, and since they have the mentality of developing multiple-skills, they strongly influence their employers to support them in different training courses, to study new areas. The good news is the worldwide companies are seeing positive results in this and therefore accepting it more and more. More investment in corporate training is being poured every year. In conclusion, it will be extremely normal to see Millennials taking extra classes and additional jobs to scale up their skills.

Physical Offices may disappear

According to different studies, by 2030, most professionals will be working from home using super-fast data terminals. Instead, companies will probably share hubs, incubators, where they can have meetings, and have other activities, but not a specific corporate office per say. Even meetings will occur virtually around the world.

More Productive

Millennials are right, flexible working hours make employees more productive, and this was proven by a study make by Nicholas Bloom a Stanford Professor, that working remotely increases productivity and satisfaction. He divided two groups of employees in China from an on-line Travel Agency, where half of them worked at home and half in the office. The workers at home performed better by 13.5%, answering more calls than the office workers, and in the end it saved the company a good amount of money.

Living in the transition

Since Companies are not in that moment yet, mainly due to the fact that bosses are from a different generation that still resists to this mind-set, there is still a transition process taking place, but the reality is Millennials will eventually convince them that this is a much better way of working. They will start showing how they can be more productive and happier if not bound to specific hours, and how money can be saved from that.

Although it seems not very important, but this transition will in fact impact the world organisations into a positive workforce. It is true that Society has many problems because of globalisation, the reality is that it also has great benefits to, and flexible working hours will be a force that will increase the levels of satisfaction of a great multitude of people, and it may be the solutions of “stress”, the world epidemic. People by having the ability of managing their own time, according to their lifestyle will not only be better because they can attend to their personal life but will also make them better employees as they will have the possibility of choosing their peak times to give their best to work.