siliconindia | | January 20168in myopinionThe flexibility of your workplace may well determine the future of your business, and it certainly will define what your future workforce looks like. In my experience, the path to achieving growth, quality and productivity begins with embracing flexibility.Workers, especially millennials, have raised their ex-pectations for employers to support varying work styles and preferences so that they can balance their profession-al and personal lives. A 2015 survey by Ernst & Young found that 75 percent of millennials want the ability to work flexibly while still being on track for promotion, and that 78 percent of this generation are part of a dual-career couple. And across all generations, parents are twice as likely to travel for business as non-parents. For countless reasons, more em-ployees work remotely. Many em-ployees don't use their assigned work-spaces, if they have them. Along with the increasing use of non-traditional, open and distributed work environ-ments, new technology enabling these shifts continues to proliferate at a rap-id pace. For me, these realities­which would for some cause office chaos and distraction­serve as drivers of expo-nential value. I believe that workplace flexibility­or Smarter Working, as we call it at Plantronics is a key differen-tiator that tomorrow's leaders should embrace to attract and retain the best people, foster innovation and fuel growth.This is a phenomenon shared by businesses and employees around the world. In India, flexibility is a top pri-ority as businesses evolve, according to a 2014 report by Dun & Bradstreet on future workplace trends. They con-ducted an extensive survey of business and human resources leaders in India and found that organizations are revis-iting their existing policies to accom-modate employees' desires for greater flexibility and opportunity. Of the companies surveyed, 57 percent have introduced flexible workplace prac-tices, and 83 percent of that cohort said it has made a positive impact on recruit-ment and retention. In addition, 76 percent of HR leaders and 61 per-cent of business leaders identified employee productivity gains as being among its primary benefits to organizational per-formance.Look at how closely that corresponds to U.S. and glob-al trends. In a Forbes article published last month, Future Workplace research director Dan Schwabel sum-marized 2016 trends. Three of the top five Does Your Business Have The Flexibility to Thrive?Ken Kannappan, CEO, Plantronics
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