Flexible Work Requires Flexible Management

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

SHARE
Request to reuse this
Add to my favorites
Topics: Organizational Culture

PMI’s new Pulse of the Profession® report on The Future of Project Work: Moving Past Office-Centric Models is a wide-ranging study of a number of different areas. In this article I want to focus on the section on different work arrangements: remote, office-based, or a combination.

The headline from the report is clearly that any of the different approaches is equally likely to result in a successful project outcome, and that success is just as likely across each of the different approaches to project delivery.

That doesn’t surprise me, but it is reassuring to have statistics to back up perceptions. However, it does raise an obvious question: If work arrangements don’t impact performance, why are more and more organizations insisting on a return to office?

The answer in some cases has nothing to do with projects per se; it’s simply a corporate policy that has no flexibility. But for those organizations that are taking slightly different approaches with different work functions, what’s driving the perception that at least some amount of office time is required?

What do the numbers say?
I want to start by looking at some of the numbers from the report, because I think that they help us to understand the problem a little more.

Firstly, 61% of people surveyed in 2023 said that they worked remotely at least some of the time. A healthy…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.