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Microsoft People Moving Business Awards

The Rt. Hon. Stephen Timms MP,  Former Minister of State for Competitiveness
Wembley Stadium,  04 September 2007

Thanks to Gordon Frazer.

I am delighted to be able to attend the inaugural People Moving Business Awards, and to see the efforts people make to allow their staff to work flexibly, and the efforts that individuals make. They might say:

We’ve got flexibility and we’re going to use it!

I used to work at Community Links in Newham, a small welfare rights organisation. It was an organisation ahead of its time, utilising a diverse workforce of volunteers, some working only hours that other commitments allowed.

That said – recent technology advances would have made life a lot easier for Community Links back in the late seventies. The acceptance of flexible working practices and advancing technologies enables workers in similar roles to Community Links advisors to log on at their convenience, without having to travel into the office, and with no loss of function.

The Civil Service, with BERR at the forefront, allows flexible working wherever possible. It utilises technology to allow people to work fluently from home, and also when on the move. Home working helps women trying to balance childcare arrangements, – allowing them to work in between taking a child to and collecting a child from school.

Hand held devices are now common across British Industry amongst staff that regularly travel, allowing them to keep in touch, and utilise travel time to catch up on and deal with emails, freeing up valuable time when back at base. In BERR alone, there are nearly 1000 users of laptops and hand held devices – about 1 in 3.

I applaud Microsoft’s approach to the awards – focussing on the use of new and advancing technologies, available on all platforms, not just Microsoft.

The winners of today’s awards demonstrate that flexible working really can be an enabler successful business
As Minister for Competitiveness the Awards hit home on several levels.

• As Minister for employment – looking at improving the workers’ lot
• As Minister with responsibility for Electronics and IT Services - seeing development and uptake of new technology
• As Minister with responsibility for Enterprise – noting that technology is now affordable for the small business as well as large organisations

Of the startling number of new Small Businesses being created over 1,000 a week, all of them will be using new technology at some point in their business.

With every new business, competition grows, and the customer on the street, paved or virtual, will benefit from choice of vendor. In an increasingly competitive business world the strong businesses will survive, strengthening the economy.
Flexible working – home working, flexi time, compressed hours, mobile working – all based on or utilising new technologies – the future is here.

The winners demonstrate this point in some style – their motto might indeed be,

We’ve got flexibility, and we’re going to use it!

Congratulations to all the winners, and I look forward to meeting some of you later.