Why are leaders continuing to ignore the evidence that flexible working works?

‘So, what’s your company’s policy?’ It’s the polite chit chat question we still ask each other years on from the pandemic. And yes, I’m talking about flexible working. Stories about businesses mandating staff back to the office five days a week have made national news over the last 12 months, making it hard to believe that pre-covid spending Monday to Friday in the office was the global standard.

Too often flexible working is dismissed as a women’s issue; one inextricably linked to childcare. And I’d argue this makes it easy for leaders - particularly those of a certain age and perspective – to sideline as a “nice to have”.

Through the practical action we’re taking to improve female talent retention at The Circle Partnership we talk often about the fact that gender equality is not a zero sum game; progress here will benefit everyone, and we need everyone to see a role for themselves in helping to effect change.

A recent study by Greystar and Grainger Reis found a lack of flexible working to be the number one reason why women in real estate leave their jobs. Too often though these kind of statistics perpetuate the assumption that flexible working is a gendered issue when the reality is that men value flexibility too; a survey of office workers by YouGov found it was important to 68% of men. The world is changing. Gender roles are changing. And flexible working benefits men as much as women - especially in construction. Added to that, the overwhelming evidence from multiple sources of research is that flexible working results in more engaged workers and higher productivity.

The typical experience of a man working on site is characterised by long hours, high stress, often extended periods away from family and other support systems, and mental and physical ill health. This contributes to an average of £160m a year being lost in sickness absence and the terrible statistic that one in four construction workers have considered suicide.

The construction sector has arguably always had the get out clause that its site-based nature makes hybrid working too difficult. But this is a discussion that’s not going away, and inflexibility will start to cost the industry dearly. The CITB estimates that 250,000 more workers are needed to enable the industry’s continued growth – and a more diverse approach to talent will be critical to meeting this requirement.

The “brand” of construction to those outside of the sector remains old-fashioned, traditional, slow to change, and for businesses to appeal to younger, more diverse talent, it needs to open up and be willing to embrace new, more flexible ways of working. The potential opportunity is huge – not just in terms of recruiting new talent (McKinsey reports that as of 2025, Gen Z will make up more than a quarter of the global workforce) but in retaining the skilled workers that already exist.

>> Also read: Building the Future Commission: why recruitment is industry’s top priority

>> Now there is proof firms benefit when they offer flexible working on construction sites

It doesn’t have to be this way. A pilot site-based study conducted in 2021 in partnership with Timewise showed that flexible working had improved wellbeing, retention, trust and engagement and reduced absenteeism with no detrimental impact on time quality or budget.

Yet despite the recruitment and retention challenges, the emotional pull factors, the very clear risks of inaction, the positive evidence of applicability; still the trend is for flexible working to be open primarily to office based staff and for official company policies to prioritise five days in the office. Why? When all rational reasons fail, it surely comes down to feeling and emotion.

Senior leaders in construction, those with the power to make decisions to change policies, are still largely male, white and of a similar generation. They succeeded through putting in the hours, away from their families, perhaps with a wife at home raising the children – why should this generation need anything different? And unofficially, we all know that many leaders just don’t trust their adult staff to do the work if they’re not physically present.

We need to keep making the argument that instead of obsessing over the inputs (how often people are physically in the workplace) we should be measuring the outputs (how much work is achieved). We need to keep pointing to the evidence and challenge lazy thinking that somehow working nine to five (or more), five days a week, represented the “good old days”.

Perhaps my perspective as a coach makes me more optimistic about the potential for true, industry-wide change but I write this while quite literally living in, working in, travelling on concrete evidence of what’s possible when the sector wants to push the boundaries.

Why not make a flexible future for construction the new frontier of innovation - and shift the external brand and reputation of the industry in the process? Real change will need new leadership mindsets and beliefs. A company policy is not enough, this requires a culture change at the very top. Who are the industry leaders setting the example?

Ceri Moyers is a director at the Circle Partnership, which is a mentoring, development, and networking organisation for the UK built environment