Vodafone: Workplace Flexibility Top Employee Concern

A flexible workplace is a top draw for employees, a new survey from Vodafone UK finds. The report, titled “Exploring the shift in employee expectations,” finds that 75 percent of employees believe a flexible work environment has a large impact on job satisfaction and improves work-life balance.

The report draws on the responses from 1,366 employees and managers across a wide range of sizes and sectors in the United Kingdom. While base salary we rated as the most important concern by 30 percent of respondents, nearly as many (28 percent) cited work-life balance as a top concern.  

“It’s not just about the money,” Patricia Hind, a business psychologist and member of the faculty at the UK-based Ashridge Business School, wrote in the study. “That is important, but people need to be valued, they need to be respected, they need to do work that they enjoy and they need to work for a company that they can respect.”

The report looked at how employers matched up to these employee preferences and found fairly polarized results. While 18 percent of employers were rated “excellent,” 8 percent were ranked “poor” by their workforce. Most of the respondents placed their companies in the middle, with 53 percent ranking as “good but could be better, and the remaining 20 percent qualifying as merely “acceptable.”

According to the survey, the sense of fulfillment an employee gets from his or her job, as well as the degree to which he or she feels valued are top contributors to whether an organization is perceived as excellent or not.

“The psychological contract is critical. This is the implicit contract between an employer and employee about how they’re going to work together,” said Hind. “It’s not written down, but is very, very important when it comes to retaining and recruiting talent.”

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