LONDON. O2 today released the results of the biggest flexible working initiative of its kind. On 8th February 2012, O2 conducted an audacious experiment, asking the entire workforce in its head office to work away from the office for the day. Employees based at O2’s Slough HQ – a quarter of its 12,000-strong workforce – participated in the pilot, operating remotely for the day as the doors were shut and lights turned off at the business’ 200,000 sq ft office.

The pilot aimed to push the boundaries of what is possible through flexible working and has underpinned O2’s contingency plans to manage expected travel disruption and delays during the summer’s Olympic Games. The facts speak for themselves. More than 2,500 people successfully worked away from the office, with only 125 mission-critical staff left in the building. Thanks to newly strengthened networks and upgraded collaboration technology, everyone who needed to get online and communicate was able to do so. 88% of staff said that they were at least as productive as on a normal day at the office, with 36% claiming to have been more productive. 16% of people slept a bit longer than usual and 14% spent additional time with their families. In line with the company’s ambitious three year sustainability plan, the experiment also benefitted the environment, with approximately 12.2t of CO2eq saved.

O2 continues to believe that the initiative sends a clear signal to its employees, business customers and other UK organisations on the advantages of working flexibly and one of the key drivers of the flexible working pilot was to research and share the results of the day.

The People Tale
Persuading thousands of people to stay away from their offices for a day might sound easy enough, but it is much harder than it looks. O2 began communicating with its staff weeks in advance, to give people plenty of notice. What surprised O2 was just how much the staff embraced the idea and concept. And as an additional bonus, the lifestyles of the workforce benefited too.

• O2 employees saved 2,000 hours of commuting time
• The majority (52%) of saved commuting time was spent working
• 14% was spent on family time
• 16% on extra sleeping (hopefully in the morning not during the day!)
• 12% on relaxation (sport, reading, personal emails etc)
• 6% on commuting elsewhere
• 88% of people that took part in the flexible working pilot thought that they were at least as productive as normal
• Over a third (36%) claimed to have been more productive
• Only 125 people needed to work from the office that day – only 109 cars entered the car park (against 1,100 on an average day),
• Only 1 person in the whole of O2 HQ didn’t know anything about the flexible working pilot and consequently arrived for work (!)

Ben Dowd, Business Director for O2 said, “Line managers are used to managing people they can see. Managing them remotely is a completely different thing. Our Pilot on 8th February didn’t solve all of those problems, but it is a good start. We can do a lot more to support line managers in charge of remote teams, but we know it’s not going to happen overnight. We’re educating people about the whole future of work here and there’s still work to be done, but we’re pleased to say this is a fantastic start”.

The Sustainability Tale
O2’s flexible working day may have revolved around a single point in time but its results have implications across much bigger timescales.
• O2’s electricity consumption decreased by 12% on February 8th. This was not as dramatic as the 53% decrease in water usage, but a significant number nonetheless
• Approximately 12.2t of CO2eq was saved on the day (for the purposes of comparison, this is equivalent to the CO2 emissions from driving 42,000 miles in a medium-sized diesel car)
• In combination with the reduction in CO2 emissions achieved by the commuting cuts, 2,000 hours of travel time was saved. These numbers represent a very substantial all-round benefit to the environment and to the company’s energy costs. This is the equivalent of an average of 45 minutes per employee
• O2 employees saved nearly £9,000 on the day primarily through reduced commuting costs
• Perhaps inevitably, the sustainability issue around flexible working is more complicated than it might at first appear. Paradoxically, for example, gas usage in the building increased slightly – probably due to the loss of body heat in the building.

The Technology Tale
Technology was inevitably right at the heart of O2’s flexible working experiment – in particular, ensuring that the network was able to support a huge increase in the number of virtual workers. O2 upgraded its Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology ahead of time, as well, as its network infrastructure; this was always a planned upgrade ahead of this summer’s Olympic Games. The company also automatically redirected traffic between servers in the north and south of its offices to ensure that the load was spread efficiently and that there were no local bottlenecks.

• A decision was made to accelerate the deployment of the new Microsoft Lync system – a risky move given the short timescales, but one which paid off by delivering a much more stable platform with better audio, video and sharing features.
• The flexible working pilot required a significantly higher use of O2’s internal network, with the reported maximum VPN users being 1,990 on the day against 1,300 on an average day. This represented 80% of the Slough HQ workforce
• The increase of VPN users compared with an average day was approximately 155%, with a reported increase in VPN data of about 110%. The network, however, remained stable, proving the potential for large scale flexible working
• At its peak, there was 162% of normal data traffic passing across the VPN, with no issues
• The IT helpdesk had a normal day with the usual volume of calls
• Instant messaging usage was up 40.8% over a normal working day. 146,876 IMs were sent over the course of the day, peaking at 17,843 IMs an hour at 3pm
• Lync Meetings hosted increased by 29%, with 406 meetings organised compared to 313 on a normal day
• Lync Meeting attendance increased by 25%, with 1,356 Lync meeting participants compared to 1,077 on a normal day
• Over 400 people attended training sessions in the run up to the flexible working day

Ben Dowd continued: “The success of O2’s experiment extends much further than just allowing some of the workforce to stay at home and work. It proves that with the right thinking and planning, even the largest organisations can protect themselves from the most severe disruptions to their business. It shows that given the right preparation and communication, conservative presenteeism-based attitudes to work can be changed, with great benefits for both managers and staff. It shows that businesses really can make significant and lasting reductions to their environmental impact, in a multitude of areas. Above all though, it demonstrates that the principles underlying flexible working really are the principles that will build the future of work, and determine the way that people, technology and buildings interact in the decades and centuries ahead. O2 is using these principles now, to build tomorrow’s businesses today.”

It is hoped that the pilot will also showcase the wider economic business case for flexible working in helping to drive efficiency, productivity and innovation. O2 has previously saved over £3 million in overheads through such measures. These learnings will be applied in line with the company’s ambitious three year sustainability plan, in which O2 pledges to help over 125,000 business employees work flexibly, and collectively save over 500,000 miles of travel and over 160,000 thousand tonnes of carbon emissions.

The initiative marks the latest phase in O2’s flexible working journey, following in the footsteps of previous efforts. These include O2’s Tomorrow’s Workspace initiative, which saw the business consolidate its operations into a single campus in Slough. By enabling the workforce to be more mobile, O2 achieved a 53 per cent reduction in its carbon footprint and despite having the same number of people HQ is now operating with 550 fewer desks.

Ben Dowd summarised the day, “Four weeks of intense preparation across the business – everywhere from HR and internal comms to IT and property services – laid the ground for an almost completely empty building and a widely distributed workforce. And thanks to this rigorous planning, the experiment was an astonishing success – not just in terms of the productivity of the workforce, but as a demonstration of the power of flexible working to forge lasting operational, cultural and environmental change within modern organisations.”

Flexible working has become an increasingly important aspect of British business culture, with a growing number of organisations and employees adopting a more flexible approach to working life as new technologies make it increasingly easy to conduct business from beyond the confines of the office. But figures from O2 suggest businesses’ policies and practices are typically narrow in their focus.

About Joined Up People
O2 has converted its understanding of businesses’ needs and objectives into solutions tailored to help organisations address the challenges they face as employees’ work and personal lives become blurred.
Joined Up People from O2 helps businesses embrace flexible working with a range of products and services that enables them to connect better and more easily with the things that matter most. It is a consultancy based approach which tailors advice and recommendations based on businesses’ specific needs. Flexible working can mean anything from using conference call on your mobile, getting emails on your phone, accessing the WiFi network via your laptop to full scale managed services.. And everything in between.

Notes to Editors:

Analysis of sustainability impacts conducted by Environmental Resources Management

For more information contact:

O2 Press Office
O2
t:01753565656
e: pressoffice@o2.com

Telefónica UK Limited is a leading communications company for consumers and businesses in the UK, with 23 million mobile, fixed line and broadband customers as at 31 December 2011.
Telefónica UK Limited is part of Telefónica Europe plc, a business division of Telefónica S.A. which uses O2 as its commercial brand in the UK, Ireland, Slovakia, Germany and the Czech Republic, and has 58.1 million customers across these markets.
Telefónica UK employs around 11,000 people in the UK and has 450 retail stores.
O2 is the naming rights partner of The O2, the world-class entertainment venue. · O2’s UK 2G mobile network provides voice and data services which are available to 99% of the UK’s population.
O2’s UK 3G (HSPA+ 900 / 2100 MHz) network currently provides voice and high speed data services to over 84% of the UK population at speeds of up to 14.4Mbp and 21Mbps in major cities.
O2 was the first UK operator to deploy a 4G/LTE trial network which has demonstrated peak speeds of over 100Mbps to a mobile device.
Telefónica Europe also owns 50% of Tesco Mobile, which operates in the UK and Ireland, and 50% of Tchibo Mobilfunk in Germany.

The survey of over 365 mainly female working parents found that 65% felt men were not given a fair hearing over flexible working.

The survey also showed 43% felt they did over 75% of the domestic chores and childcare.

Around 40% of working mums had taken a step back in their career since having children. Only 29% had progressed. The rest had stayed at the same level.

Thirty seven per cent of those who responded worked full time and 41% worked part time. The rest were not working.

Women were concerned about the lack of flexible new jobs. A third felt trapped in the job they went on maternity leave from because they could not find a new job which gave them the work life balance they needed.

A massive 89% had considered working for themselves to get a better work life balance, although 43% said they couldn’t afford to. On 27 March at Workingmums LIVE London, its second London flexible jobs fair, Workingmums.co.uk is launching a new Business Zone to give support and advice, including funding advice, to women considering setting up their own business or franchise or seeking self employment.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures and the survey found 28% of working mums felt their children saw them as inspiring role models, while 22% felt their kids thought they were stressed out and exhausted.

Most thought that girls were less likely than in the past to think that some jobs were not for them. Some 75% thought things were getting better on this score, but six per cent thought that in recent years girls had become more likely to think that some jobs were more for men than women.

Some 80% of working parents thought children should be educated about work life balance issues to prepare them for the impact on their working life, but most thought this should happen at secondary school. Others felt children should not be held back in what they want to do because of considerations about whether they have a family in the future.

The survey also looked at issues like childcare. Almost half used grandparents for childcare. A quarter had no back-up care in the case of an emergency.

Gillian Nissim, founder of Workingmums.co.uk, said: “The results of this survey show that, although much progress is being made on flexible working for women, there is concern that men are finding it more difficult to negotiate this. This has a knock-on effect on women who, due to the high cost of childcare, may be forced out of work or to work fewer hours than they would like. There is also concern about the lack of new flexible jobs. If the Government extends the right to request flexible working to all workers we hope that it will become the norm and businesses will begin to think of flexible working as the default position when recruiting, thus opening up roles to a more diverse talent pool.”

Smartphones have gained rapid adoption among consumers, and comScore highlighted mobile social media in Europe as one of the key drivers, with social media accessed by 48.4 million consumers – an increase of 76 per cent since past year.

Google Android saw significant gains in the EU in the race to deliver smartphone platforms, unseating market leader Symbian in 3 out of 5 European markets measured. Apple’s iPhone4 and iPhone 3GS lead as the year’s most acquired devices, but Nokia still accounted for the largest share of total mobile handsets in use (feature phone and smartphones combined) across four of the five EU countries. That plays to Microsoft as it rebuilds its platform share through partnership with Nokia.

Despite all the talk of tablet devices breaking through in 2011, in the EU only 8.3 percent of all mobile subscribers reported having a tablet. comScore however believes tablets herald “a shift to an increasingly multi-device lifestyle that is becoming the norm for many consumers” who it names ‘digital omnivores.’ Despite accessing the same content, comScore believes each device – smartphone and tablet – has very different peak usage times throughout a typical day, highlighting varying use cases to the digitally-connected consumer.

19th July in Leeds and 20th September in London.

Full details coming soon!

With a strong focus on the changing landscape for Local Government this event included contributions from a broad spectrum of high profile speakers, an innovation market place, round table discussions, interactive workshops and much more including a ‘taster’ ‘unconference’ session.

Carolyn Downs, Incoming Chief Executive of the Local Government Group gave the headline keynote address. Further speaker and workshop details are here.

Steve Jobs handled the iCloud announcement himself this morning at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. iCloud is the company’s new cloud storage offering that will handle everything from documents to media syncing.

Due to launch in the Autumn (we can’t bring ourselves to say ‘Fall’), iCloud will be free with iOS5 and will include 5Gb of free storage. You can register your interest here.

Nomad notice more than a passing similarity with Dropbox. A cloud utility that we’ve found absolutely invaluable here at Nomad and would have no hesitation in recommending to others. Dropbox does the following;

Any file you save to Dropbox also instantly saves to all your computers, phones, and the Dropbox website.

This event aimed to achieve the following objectives;

• To present the findings of the heat map and establish a common understanding of mobile and flexible working across London;
• To see where the gaps lie (issues faced) in progressing mobile and flexible working;
• To share lessons learnt and best practice stories around implementation;
• To identify and learn from the more advanced Boroughs in mobile/flexible working;
• To network and build relationships with other London Boroughs and support one another in establishing efficiencies, and;
• To discuss technology and delivery partners, experienced in mobile and flexible working.

The event was splendidly captured graphically (click to enlarge image);

Attendees

• 50 Local Council attendees (across 25 Boroughs)
• 4 speakers (Aiden McManus – Croydon Council, Ken Eastwood – Public Sector Nomads, Andrew Richards – Hammersmith & Fulham and Grace Addy – Croydon Council)
• Sponsors (BT, Capgemini, Kirona, NDL and O2)
• Event co-ordinators (Claire Corbett, Charlotte Stothert and Emma Pluck)

Observations

The event went very well and successfully explored common issues and barriers to implementing mobile working and flexible working. The workshop sessions were particularly useful with a number of participants able to enrich the debate with their specific experiences. It was clear that a number of authorities are engaged in quite radical accommodation projects and a number of others expect to be shortly.

There was an appetite on the day to develop closer collaboration and a platform to exchange and share experiences and best practice. Southwark Council, for example, described a manager workshop programme that had successfully encouraged buy-in and understanding of mobile and flexible working. Materials and experiences like this need to be shared across the public sector to avoid duplication of effort.

Panel Discussion

The event concluded with an open panel Q&A session, again expertly represented graphically;

Next Steps

• To explore a buddy-up system whereby councils agree to provide support to others less experienced in mobile & flexible working implementations or to align councils who are at the same stage of implementation;
• Consider a follow up event, and;
• Develop an online forum to enable information to be accessible and provide a platform for open discussion and networking between councils.

The relaunch of our website includes a new membership forum and we hope to be supporting London Council’s on this agenda going forward.

A working group consisting of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified the radiation emitted by mobile handsets as ‘possibly carcinogenic’.

The panel of 31 scientists from 14 countries concluded that there ‘could be some risk’ for phone users.

Dr. Jonathan Samet, chairman of the working group, said, “There could be some risk, and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer risk”.

Science blogger Ed Yong works for Cancer Research UK. He has written a very nice explanation of what the WHO announcement really means;

“It means that there is some evidence linking mobile phones to cancer, but it is too weak to make any strong conclusions. Specifically, IARC’s panel said that the evidence that mobile phones pose a health risk was “limited” for two types of brain tumours – glioma and acoustic neuroma – and “inadequate” when it comes to other types of cancer.

The Chairman of the group, Dr Jonathan Samet, said, “The conclusion means that there could be some risk, and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer risk.”

IARC classifies different things according to whether they are likely to cause cancer, from tobacco to viruses to certain jobs. They are the gold standard for this sort of thing. They have five possible categories of risk:

Group 1 is the highest, reserved for things like smoking, asbestos, alcohol and so on. It means that there’s extremely strong evidence that the thing in question causes cancer.

Group 2A includes things that are “probably carcinogenic to humans”. Here, the evidence is “limited” in humans, but “sufficient” from animal studies.

Group 2B – this is the one that mobile phones now fall under – means something is “possibly carcinogenic to humans”. It means there is “limited evidence” that something causes cancer in people, and even the evidence from animal studies is “less than sufficient”. Group 2B means that there is some evidence for a risk but it’s not that convincing. This group ends up being a bit of a catch-all category, and includes everything from carpentry to chloroform.”

It would appear that a decade after the Stewart Report (Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones) we are no further on in our understanding – there is still insufficient evidence to conclude either way whether using a mobile phone does or doesn’t increase the risk of cancer.

The UK government’s ‘precautionary approach’ for mobile phone use, which includes the recommendation that mobile phone use by children for non-essential calls should be discouraged, still stands.

Image: Hello Operator, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from derekolson’s photostream

The Act requires agencies across the US to step up efforts to implement telework to help ensure continuity of operations, reduce management costs and improve employees’ ability to balance their work and life commitments.

The United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has reviewed all agency policies against a best practices checklist, developed by an interagency team of telework experts and all agencies have received customised feedback on their policies, to assist each agency revise its telework policy in accordance with the Act.

The Act requires each agency to designate a senior management official as the Telework Managing Officer (TMO) to help transform the use of telework.

By June 9, all agencies must revise their telework policies, determine the eligibility of all employees and notify all employees of their telework status. The Act also requires that all eligible employees and their managers receive interactive telework training and enter into written telework agreements.

As the lead agency for implementation of the Act, OPM has been tasked with coordinating resources to help agencies meet the requirements of the Act as well as best practices so that agencies may successfully use telework as a management tool to get work done.

It is clear that the drive towards higher levels of teleworking are driven, at least in part by the recognition of the contribution telework capabilities can make to national resilience. Having a dispersed, connected workforce is seen as an important step to ensuring that the United States Government can continue to carry out mission-critical activities in the event of an emergency.

By helping support a distributed workforce, telework is a tool for emergency planning at all levels – from snowstorms that close offices in a region for a day or two, to pandemic influenza that may affect operations over the course of weeks or even months.

The key to successful use of telework in the event of a crisis is deemed to be an effective routine telework program. Managers are required to ensure as many employees as possible have telework capability (i.e., current telework arrangements, connectivity, and equipment commensurate with their work needs and frequent enough opportunities to telework to ensure all systems have been tested and are known to be functional). This will require creative thinking beyond current implementation of telework, drawing in employees who otherwise might not engage in remote access and ensuring their effectiveness as a distributed workforce.

Read more about telework in the United States at www.telework.gov