BUSINESSES of the future will need to make themselves more disorganised if they want to retain creative staff, a poll suggests today.

Most employees would enjoy greater flexibility in the workplace and most employers are willing to provide it, according to a report by Demos, the think-tank, and Orange, the mobile operator.

Employers will come under increasing pressure to let their staff “align their working lives with their personal values and lifestyle aspirations”, the report said. They would need to structure their businesses in a less rigid manner as a result, and encourage staff who wanted to combine office life with voluntary work.

Paul Miller and Paul Skidmore, who compiled the report, said: “Organisations will have to loosen up so that they feel less like organisations to their employees. That is what we mean by ‘disorganisation’. People want to work in organisations that feel a bit more human, and offer greater flexibility and autonomy.”

They called for “flattened hierarchies”, which they say can bring employees authority and autonomy.

In a poll, 85 per cent of people believed that flexible working would increase job satisfaction, and 59 per cent of business leaders said they would allow their staff to work more flexibly. More than half of business leaders expected that demand would increase from their employees to become involved in social responsibility projects.

One in five people said they would prefer to work for smaller companies, while only one in eight said they would prefer to work for a larger organisation. A sign of how traditional hierarchies continue to dominate, the poll found that 20 per cent of workers speak to their boss’s boss less than once a year.

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