Flexibility

“Even when organizations say they care about people having work-life balance, there’s this undercurrent of recognition for the people who are there 24/7, who pick up the phone whenever they’re called. And then there’s the big question for most knowledge workers: How do you know when you’re done?” – Phyllis Stewart Pires, senior director WorkLife Strategy at Stanford University

In many work environments, flexibility is still viewed as a privilege for a chosen few. So workers with flexible schedules and remote work tend to put in longer hours, viewing the time as an accommodation or gift.¹ Because work can spread across 24 hours, seven days a week, boundaries between work and home can dissolve. Work and e-mails spill over into time and space once reserved for being “off” to rest, recover, and live the rest of life. Now, Americans work more odd hours, nights, and weekends than workers in other countries.² The mere anticipation of getting off-hours work e-mails, and the constant checking for them, are spiking stress levels.³

• The Planning Fallacy: Humans are notoriously bad at predicting their own futures and often fail to anticipate how long tasks will take to complete.⁴ In planning their schedules, workers may overestimate how much they can actually do in a day, which, in a flexible environment, can extend the workday into the evening, and consume mental bandwidth with worry about how to get it all done, or guilt when the day ends and the task remains undone.
• Affective Forecasting: Humans underestimate how much emotional and physical states will affect their future decisions.⁵ In procrastinating, or putting off work in the moment, workers may assume they’ll be fantastically productive in the future, and not take into account that they may feel exhausted, distracted or unmotivated when it comes time to actually do that work in the future.
• Network Effects: Working flexibly forfeits the gains that come when workers work at the same time and in the same place, and taxes individual attention. To coordinate, workers rely more on e-mail at all hours. To compensate for knowledge gaps and because humans are neurologically attuned to novelty, workers are driven to check e-mail constantly, in part to signal their commitment to work.

Promising New Ideas

1. Create slack. Put time in your calendar every day or every week to account for unanticipated “shocks” and planning fallacy bias.⁶
2. Make it costly to send business e-mails after hours. Use technology to schedule e-mails to go out during the work day. Or design a prompt that asks someone to think twice before hitting Send.
3. Create autoresponders for off-hour e-mail. Signaling that e-mail is sent outside of work hours helps create a new norm that taking time off to rest and re-energize is more valued than burning out.
4. Make refreshing the inbox a conscious choice. Removing auto refresh disrupts the cycle of constant checking and interruption.
5. Use commitment devices. Colleagues, teams, and organizations can use precommitment strategies to help meet deadlines, to cut meeting time, or to leave the office or stop working at a certain hour.⁷

Best Practice

• In rigorous, randomized control trials, researchers found that training workers and managers to work flexibly, normalize caregiving responsibilities, and focus on performance rather than hours worked in a results-only work environment, improved worker health and cut quitting rates nearly in half. Workers—and their family members—began sleeping more and feeling less stress and work-life conflict.⁸

“The culture here is, when you go home, the time is yours for you to go enjoy your family and your life outside of work. So when you’re at work, you’re focused. When you’re working a full eight hours, and not checking Facebook, but really working that whole time, you’re tired. When you go home, I’m so grateful that the rule here is no checking e-mail before and after work. I’ve got other stuff to do. Like taking care of my baby. It’s really nice.” – Lisa Ho, project manager, Menlo Innovations, Michigan