“Raise your hand if you’ve ever responded to a work email from home,” the presenter began, during a session on work and technology. All the audience members raised their hands, acknowledging that despite set hours and offices designated for work tasks, each of them had engaged in some form of virtual work from home. Technology continues to facilitate greater flexibility in where, when, and how employees participate in the workforce.
According to a recent review of Fortune 1000 companies, flexibility is a popular theme among work-life benefits offered by top performing companies. Many executives and employees alike believe that offering more flexibility in work hours and even work locations makes it easier to arrange work and life domains in complementary ways. However, the results of increased flexibility are not entirely positive.
While some individuals find flexibility to be freeing, giving them a greater sense of satisfaction with work and life, others struggle to clarify the boundaries between them as they become increasingly blurred. In fact, researcher Al James explains that the reality of flexibility as a work-life benefit falls short of the promise.
“As firms reorganize work in response to globalisation and new technological opportunities, ‘flexibility’ for many workers has come to mean increased workloads, less predictable work schedules and more unsocial work hours as firms demand they work longer and harder to minimise labour costs” (James, p. 1).
For employees with flexible schedules, work time often bleeds into the hours of home life as managers expect responses to emails well after business hours or workers take projects out of the office, literally removing the line between work and home. For employees who enjoy working from home, employers may expect the commute time that was saved to be added to the workday and the home office provides little, if any, separation between work and life.
Although flexibility can provide employees with more freedom to move fluidly between work and life roles, the increasingly blurred boundaries can often intensify the tension between the two spheres rather than resolving it. Removing the natural boundaries between work and life, like office space and structured business hours, means individuals with flexibility must set – and enforce – their own boundaries. Greater flexibility magnifies the risk of work overflowing into life areas or personal commitments interrupting work projects.
Instead of touting flexibility as the answer to alleviating work-life conflict, the question should be whether flexibility suits the employee’s life and career stages, work-life style, and occupation. Employees need to take stock of how flexibility is likely to help and hinder their work-life balance. Further, before setting up a flexible work arrangement, managers and employees should have frank conversations about how the employee will set appropriate boundaries to prevent work or life from overtaking the other.
Managers need to create a plan for supporting employee needs. For instance, they may institute agreements about how or when evening emails will be answered (the next morning?). Setting expectations up front can reduce the pressure to push past predetermined boundaries when added flexibility makes those boundaries invisible.
Technology that enables employees to work from home or connect asynchronously with their team holds promise for giving individuals more autonomy in managing work and life roles. Yet, the added flexibility in how, where, and when the work gets done leaves many workers feeling like they are perpetually “on duty” because they are always connected. Instead of improving work-life balance, greater workplace flexibility may actually add to the overload.
References
James, Al (2018). Work-Life Advantage: Sustaining regional learning and innovation. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
