For enquiries call:
+1-469-442-0620
Whether you are a startup that is just starting off to swim against the current in the wild waters of business or an age-old organization eyeing survival amidst cutthroat competition, a significant change that organizations have had to embrace is novel and non-traditional methods of working. These include flexible working or agile working - though used interchangeably, both are varied concepts in the ever-evolving space of business. In this article today, I aim to help you understand the nitty-gritty of these novel methods, the terminologies, the essential differences between agile vs flexible work, and how they impact businesses in the current day and age. So, supposing you are a manager who is new to an agile organization, or you are a fresher looking to make your name in the industry, knowing these ways of working and their delicate intricacies will be very helpful in your understanding of how, when and where the workforce is moving in the future.
Agile work involves all the activities and enablement functions performed by the organization to encompass flexible working policies or remote working to allow employees to have a more flexible approach to work. It entails adopting changes in processes, governance models, infrastructure, physical spaces, timings, and a lot more, along with a core focus on how these changes are going to impact the organization’s ways of working. Agile working practices are often confused with agile project management; the former is based on the essential beliefs from the agile manifesto, i.e., giving importance to:
Despite being viewed as contrary, agile working is organization-centric in terms of an assessment of how the changes impact business results and what needs to be started, what needs to be stopped, or what must be continued to achieve desired outcomes.
Understand all about agile work and how organizations enable agile working practices and excel at the art of agile project management by taking the industry-popular online Agile courses from KnowledgeHut. Enroll today!
Flexible working, or Flexible work as it is popularly known, is a method in which an employee has greater autonomy over the ways of working, such as the work hours, agreement (part-time or full-time), location, and presence (work from home or hybrid or nearby office location) to serve the work needs of the employer. It is more employee-centric and helps employers empathize with the employee's personal needs to provide flexibility in maintaining a work-life balance, sharing responsibilities, and working from a place of comfort for the employee. It helps employers extend their employee well-being initiatives to meet their goals of diversity and inclusion in the workplace by engaging niche talent in a practical yet poised manner.
Quick fact - According to the international workspace group, 85% of 15,000+ respondents feel that flexible working leads to higher productivity.
I am sure the two styles of work are evident enough by now; let us take a deep dive into some of the key differences to understand how agile vs flexible differ from each other:
Parameter | Flexible Working | Agile Working |
Focus area | Employee centric | Organization centric |
Work hours | Shorter or flexible work hours | It may involve traditional as well as flexible work hours |
Demands shift in | Employee lifestyle & habits | Organization setup, processes, and, more importantly, mindset |
Solves problems for | Employee | Organization and Employee |
Offering | Employee well-being and benefits | Organizational process optimization |
Type of change | Superset - involves adapting to agile ways of working | Subset - focuses on the adoption of agile ways, which may or may not be fully flexible |
Collaboration | It may involve less face-to-face collaboration | Involves and revolves around more face-to-face collaboration |
Colocation | Does not encourage colocation | Encourages working together or in more minor pairs and colocation |
Carbon footprint | Reduces by a large extent | Reduces to a limited extent |
Taking up the KnowledgeHut online Agile courses prepares you to ace any kind of interview or certification easily. Understand more about how teams function in the modern agile world with content curated and imparted by industry experts.
A critical difference between agile vs flexible is that adapting flexible work policies is more of an employee-centric change, while agile working is more of a customer or organization-centric change that organizations inculcate. Flexible working is aimed at talent retention, higher productivity, and reduced staff sickness, which are employee-centric measures. In contrast, agile working involves creating open or quiet zones, collaboration spaces, hot desking (rotational or on-need allocation of desks), breakout areas, etc., including changes in organization setup, infra and physical appearance, accessibility, and design.
Flexible working propagates changes or leniency in employees’ working hours, encouraging shifts/schedules in the comfort of the employee. Flexible working involves adjustment of work hours, presence, and availability of the employee, while agile working is focused on bringing team members together to collaborate and have as much face-to-face communication as possible, thereby encouraging a collective schedule and cadence over individual working hours. It is important to note that this point of working hours is often confused when people talk about flexible and agile working.
A foundational point of difference between agile and flexible working is agile working is based on principles of agile project management and calls for a mindset shift to adapt practices and agile ways of working to deliver iteratively incrementally and add value to the customer over frequent intervals of time. Any agile transformations in the organization entail being agile over doing agile - agile project management focuses on doing agile while the organization setup, infrastructure, physical spacing, etc., create an environment to foster and imbibe values of being agile. Flexible working, on the other hand, involves the organization accepting the lifestyle changes of the employees in completing work-related assignments.
Agile working involves restructuring office spaces to enable flow and collaboration, solving the issues/challenges faced by teams and organizations in value delivery to the customer. Flexible working, on the other hand, solves the problems/challenges faced by the employee in meeting work commitments, and though it helps the organization, it has an overarching impact on the employee over the organization.
It is an important point to note that both agile vs flexible are the kind of offerings given by the organization to the employees. Flexible working subject to contractual obligations (as per local laws and regulations) is offered to employees as a prerequisite for employee well-being and inclusion in the workplace. Agile working is an offering aimed at improving team productivity, building cadence, and synchronization to strengthen the delivery and governance model of the organization.
Flexible working vs agile working is more or less a superset, with agile working being a subset of change as agile working involves adopting a specific design, setup, and lifestyle, which at times may be flexible or, at times, may not. While flexible working is more relaxed, agile working may sometimes require specific structures to enable the synergetic achievement of team and organizational goals.
Because the employee may follow a schedule that suits their personal needs, there are chances of getting stuck in silos. To avoid this, agile working adds impetus to face-to-face collaboration and co-working spaces. Agile working believes work gets done faster when the team is closer to each other or works in a well-knitted setup instead of individualistic working.
Extending the above reason, agile working encourages colocation to enable team members to follow a standard schedule, adopt agile ways of working, learn, and foster as a team towards higher achievability. Flexible working, on the other hand, calls for contribution and collaboration on a need-based approach, as the team member may otherwise work following their own time and schedule.
A more significant change these novel practices bring is environmental contribution, i.e., reduction of carbon footprint over erstwhile methods of having everyone present in the office and working. Even this is a point of difference between agile working and flexible working - agile working still has a reasonably larger carbon footprint over flexible working, which has a minimal carbon footprint due to no travel and usage of office equipment/infrastructure - hence, flexible working entails more significant carbon footprint reduction for the organization.
Albeit I may have shown you how agile working versus flexible working differ, both of them are also similar in a lot of ways; let us now try to understand a few points of similarity between the two:
Now, when it comes to choosing between agile work or flexible work, though it may be susceptible to the personal choice, conditions of the employee, domain, and functions of the employer (e.g., workspaces where personally identifiable information (PII) is involved, employers may have to abide by certain legal conditions), however, specific points of consideration that may influence the choice include:
Having looked in detail at the agile work and flexible work differences, it becomes an important point to consider the working style based on the above factors.
Agile working and flexible working are newer methods or ways of working that complement each other in bringing in the required flexibility and doing away with restrictive practices that hamper employee and organizational goals. Agile working, which involves broader IT strategy changes, can enable simplified methods of working with maximum productivity, the right amount of flexibility, and a minimal number of constraints. Agile working involves allowing flow across the office space by following an open plan and creating aesthetic spaces around - nooks and corners, cafe/theater-like seating arrangements, bean bags, comfortable lounge meeting rooms, etc.- to enable employees to feel comfortable.
Flexible working, on the other hand, allows employees to have a balanced lifestyle, with work and personal time being scheduled without conflicts, yielding more focus time and uninterrupted work sessions. Both these methods aim to bridge the gap between the employees’ needs and the organization’s needs to bring in a successful mix to more outstanding performance achievements.
Agile work and flexible work are two techniques or styles of working that need to coexist for organizations to create a hybrid environment and yield maximum efficiencies. However, even if one of them is adapted, it still serves the purpose. That said, there is no scenario in which both may become mutually exclusive as they are complementing and not conflicting functions to enable effective outcomes.
Both agile work and flexible work are aimed at creating positive outcomes, with agile being more focused on organizational impact while flexible being more focused on employee work-life balance. Both are aimed at bringing in greater satisfaction by improving employee experiences, extending employee well-being, and making the work environment engaging over mundane ways of working.
The most prominent challenge organizations face in adapting to agile or flexible work involves buy-in from senior management as the changes involved for both are widespread, especially for agile work, which involves changes in physical, network, and delivery infrastructure. Apart from these security challenges, the maturity of team members, commitment, and trust remain other challenges that can derail the adoption of these ways of working.
There are a lot of tools that support modern working styles of agile work or flexible work that aid communication (tools like Microsoft Teams, Salesforce Slack, Google Meet, Zoom), scheduling of work (Google Calendar, Microsoft Teams/suite), Task Management (Jira, VersionOne, Confluence, CA Agile Central) and a lot of other tools which include cybersecurity products, and other tools enable collaboration.
| Name | Date | Fee | Know more |
|---|
