Agile Working vs Flexible Working: What’s the Difference?

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.

What is Agile Work?

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:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change by following a plan

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.

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What is Flexible Work?

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.

Agile Work vs Flexible Work: Comparison Table

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

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Difference Between Agile Work and Flexible Work

1. Agile Work vs Flexible Work: Focus area

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.

2. Agile Work vs Flexible Work: Work Hours

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.

3. Agile working vs flexible working: Kind of shift required

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.

4. Agile vs Flexible: Solves issues faced by

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.

5. Agile vs Flexible Working: Offering

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.

6. Agile vs Flexible: Type of Change 

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.

7. Agile vs Flexible: Face-to-Face collaboration

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.

8. Agile Work vs Flexible Work: Colocation 

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.

9. Agile vs Flexible Work: Environment contribution

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.

How Are They Similar?

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:

1. Both agile and flexible working enable efficiency and adaptability across the team and enterprise.
2. Both methods are complementary and go hand-in-hand to enable organizational governance, delivery, and processes across the organization.
3. Both have a singular goal - agile working aims to enable flow across the space, and flexible working seeks to maximize individual productivity while taking into account work-life balance.
4. Both methods enable the development of a dynamic workforce by creating or abetting conditions to improve the work environment.
5. Agile and flexible working attributes vital importance to the mental and physical health of the workforce. By establishing quiet zones, team collaboration sections, integrated workspaces, stairs/gym-based breakouts, etc., agile working aims to keep the workforce active and healthy to ensure maximum focus and cognitive functions, while flexible working ensures employees take the required team to heal out of any stress/challenges and join work at a time at which their productivity levels are maximum.
6. Both methods enable cost savings by ensuring optimal allocation of office space, infrastructure, and employee time.
7. Agile and flexible working both enable organizations to have a smaller carbon footprint vis-a-vis traditional working methods.

What Should You Choose Between Agile Work vs Flexible Work?

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:

• For organizations that have been functioning traditionally, moving to agile workspaces and working styles should be the first choice for employees to get the initial experience of flexible working.
• For teams that engage in operations with sensitive data such as PII and processes that involve active customer calling or voice processes, agile working is best suited, though hybrid and remote working styles have also been successful with the latest technology.
• For employees who are required to support their personal or family needs, flexible working in a hybrid mode (which is popularly being followed by a lot of organizations) derives the best value.
• Employees must take into account security practices while opting for flexible working as the web, and especially public place access to the web, is vulnerable to malpractices, hacking, ransomware, and a lot more complexities. To avoid such instances, agile working still serves flexibility, which may benefit employees.

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.

Conclusion

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.