Busting Traffic and Other Worldwide Problems
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.
— Milton Friedman1
THE WORLD HAS QUITE A FEW CRISES kicking around at the moment. Many continue to worsen because the popular solutions thrown at them are just expensive band-aids – they fail to address the root causes of the problems.
In this chapter, I’ll take the opportunity to dive into some crises that are impacting society and the world around us that have been caused, at least in part, by work rigidity and can be solved, to a large extent, by you, the business leader, providing flexibility for your people.
The crises we’ll talk about here are:
• Aging populations and retirement
• Gender inequality, domestic violence, and identity challenges
• Preventable health problems
• Traffic congestion and pollution
Aging Populations and Retirement
Working your whole life in a rigid workplace is like swimming entire laps of a fifty-meter pool without taking any breaths.
It’s tiring.
It feels never-ending.
And when you get to the end of the swim (retirement age), you just want to stop and get out. That’s what most people do. They work their whole lives, taking short, gasping breaths on the weekends and holidays, after each long, breathless lap, before putting their heads back under the water to desperately swim for another week, month, year.
As any swim instructor will tell you with a raised eyebrow, swimming this way, without breathing, is unsustainable, just as working this way, without taking enough time to look after human needs, is unsustainable. The result for one is that you don’t enjoy swimming, hence you dread going to the pool and celebrate when swimming season has ended. The result for the other is that you don’t enjoy work, hence you dread Monday mornings and celebrate when you can leave on Friday and never come back.
Retirement is a funny thing. When you consider all the human needs that work helps to fulfill (subsistence, protection, understanding, participation, creation, identity, and affection), it’s odd that we would abruptly cut it out of our lives when we can. But when you think of how our traditional workplaces starve many of our needs in other ways, our joyful exit makes sense.
Leisure and freedom, for instance, are two of our most deprived needs during our working years, so they’re two of the biggest things people look forward to when they retire: to finally rest, after being busy for forty-five years! And to have the freedom to decide what to do with their days. Affectionate time with family and loved ones is another starved need that retirees can finally feed; grandchildren beware!
The initial relief of escaping work (and the daily commute) through retirement is short-lived, however. Problems rear their heads, both for the individual and society.
The health impacts of retirement are a good place to start when determining if it’s good or bad for people. Studies show that health results in the short term after retiring are either neutral or slightly positive. One reason for this could be the immediate relief employees feel after leaving rigid workplaces and finally being able to fulfill their needs for leisure, freedom, and affection. Also, retirees can spend more time taking care of their health. But a comprehensive study by the United Kingdom’s Institute of Economic Affairs discovered “large negative health effects of retirement among both women and men” in the long term.
The researchers found that retirement*
• decreases the likelihood of being in “very good” or “excellent” self-assessed health by about 40 percent;
• increases the probability of suffering from clinical depression by about 40 percent;
• increases the probability of having at least one diagnosed physical condition by about 60 percent; and
• increases the probability of taking a drug for such a condition by about 60 percent.
And to emphasize the long-term impacts of retirement, the researchers revealed that doubling the number of years in retirement
• decreases the likelihood of being in “very good” or “excellent” self-assessed health by 11 percent;
• increases the probability of suffering from clinical depression by 17 percent;
• increases the probability of having at least one diagnosed physical condition by 22 percent; and
• increases the probability of taking a drug for such a condition by 19 percent.2
They stated that the reasons why retirement affects health remain ambiguous, and possible causes include less social interaction (if work was the main source of human contact), lower incomes leading to lower investment in health-increasing activities (playing sports, exercising, traveling), and less physical activity in general (if, for example, someone’s work was physical in nature). Based on the previous chapter, it could be said that the unfulfillment of other human needs also played a major part in these negative health effects by, for example, creating poverties in understanding, identity, and participation.
Another study, of blue-collar workers in Austria, found a significant relationship between early retirement and increased rates of death. Due to region-specific changes to unemployment insurance schemes, people in some parts of the country were able to retire up to three-and-a-half years before others. It was found that men who retired early (on average, nine months earlier than others) were 13 percent more likely to die before the age of sixty seven. The study attributed the early deaths to “changes in health-related behaviors (e.g., physical inactivity, drinking, smoking).”3
Interestingly, women’s mortality rates in this study were unaffected by retirement age. The authors propose that the difference in mortality effects between men and women in this case is that “giving up the job is associated with loss of social status and identity for the main breadwinner [men], while work (and giving it up) is not central in life for the additional income earner [women].”
In other words, these poor blokes who retired were suddenly afflicted by poverties of identity, participation, affection, understanding, and creation (not so much protection and subsistence, because Austria has a strong social welfare system); and then they tried to feed those starving needs with food, alcohol, cigarettes, and lounging around too much.
Another problem with full retirement is that populations across the developed world are getting older. We’re living longer, having fewer kids and waiting longer to have said kids. For the first time in history, there are now more people in the world over the age of sixty five than there are children under five; it’s estimated that by 2050, one in six people (16 percent) will be sixty-five years of age or older.4 (Most developed countries have already reached this figure; Japan has the highest proportion of sixty-five-year-olds, at 28 percent.)5
Economically, this may end up being a bad story.
As populations age, you end up with a greater number of people depending on government support compared to people who are employed and thus funding that support; there will always be some people who can’t fund their own retirement.
There’s also a greater strain on healthcare because it’s used disproportionately by older people. “The hospitalization rates among Australians sixty five years and older are more than four times their younger counterparts,” and they also visit GPs twice as often as younger people.6 This pattern of increased demand on health services will be seen around the world. These services are already strained in many places, which affects quality of care in many ways.7
The Australian Productivity Commission, on the topic of the country’s aging population,
was particularly concerned about a lowering of the growth of labor force participation rates and overall a decline in labor supply, along with a reduction in labor productivity and national incomes. Due to these trends in economic outcomes, the Commission projected an increase in the fiscal burden related to expenses for health services, aged care and pensions in future years. The health care sector was singled out for special attention, as the Productivity Commission considered it to be Australia’s greatest future fiscal challenge, with the share of public spending on health in GDP expected to rise sharply, from its current level of 6.5 percent to 10.8 percent in 2060.8
So it appears that full retirement is making us unhealthy, killing us early, and straining the economy. According to the evidence, it seems it would be a great thing for the health of the older population, and the health of the economy, if people worked longer into their lives.
One way we could get this to happen is for governments to incentivize people to continue working by increasing pension ages, based on the average healthy life expectancy of adults for that country. Another, more positive and less Big-Brother-y solution is in the hands of the capitalists: make life and work more sustainable by providing greater flexibility to your entire workforce.
Going back to our swimming analogy, what if work didn’t feel like swimming without taking any breaths? What if we did what our swim instructor told us to do and slowed down our rate of strokes and took deep breaths at regular intervals? What if we were able to work and fulfill other human needs, by resting and having more time to live, even during an average Monday or Tuesday? Wouldn’t both swimming and life be more enjoyable and less of a panic? Wouldn’t they both be much more sustainable?
Increased flexibility, for both the older workforce and everyone else, will have two wonderful effects:
• First, and the effects will be immediate, is that many people at retirement age are fully aware of the benefits that work provides them and they would continue working if they were given more flexibility, such as working part time, or remotely, or with flextime, or some combination of these.
A survey of Australian workers found that “73 percent of older workers said they would work more hours and stay in the workforce longer if flexible options were available.” Again, people want to work, seemingly regardless of age. From purely an economic productivity viewpoint, the authors of this study said this “could add an additional 2.1 million potential work years to the national productivity resource – equating to $134.8 billion, or 1.3 percent of Australian GDP.”9
Additionally, individuals’ health and well-being would improve, and the economic burden for healthcare and aged care systems would decline.
Studies show that people who work part time later in life enjoy the “best mental health and well-being outcomes” compared to those who are either unemployed or who work full time.10
• Second, and the effects will be long-term, is that if work is less painful and life-sucking, people will be in less of a hurry to get the hell out when they reach retirement age. They won’t be starved for leisure, affection, freedom, and other needs, so they’ll be more willing to continue reaping the positive effects of work. They’re also likely to be healthier longer, and thus more capable of working longer. (I go deeper into the health benefits of increased flexibility later in this chapter.)
On top of needs-fulfillment, people can spend more time and effort developing skills and knowledge, ensuring that even as they age they’ll be up-to-date in knowledge and ability.
The Austrian blue-collar study, which can be applied to much of the working world, and different colors or collars, showed that with greater flexibility and less need to be the breadwinner, men would be struck with smaller identity crises when they do eventually retire, because work wouldn’t be the only way they enriched their lives. This would reduce their desire to eat, drink, and smoke away the associated pain. (More on gender equality and the identity of humans in the next section.)
And although this chapter isn’t about the benefits of flexibility for business or productivity, there are great incentives for business owners to help people continue working later in life by allowing more flexibility.
Older people generally have more life and professional experience and have a lot to offer in terms of mentoring younger workers and maintaining a clear head through problems. They’ve been there and done that, they’ve learned through their own failures and successes, so they have powers of foresight that younger people in the workplace are still developing.
Older people, especially now, tend to be better communicators and have better overall soft skills than younger people, whose anxiety levels hit the roof when they need to use a phone to talk to someone. (I’m allowed to say this, because I’m a self-confessed talking-on-the-phone avoider).
Bottom-line benefits have been found in firms that have greater age diversity and practices that support “age-inclusive HR practices.” This comes from improved performance as well as reduced employee turn-over.11 A global survey also found that 86 percent of people prefer to be in multi-generational teams, and “85 percent say that an age-diverse team helps them come up with innovative ideas and solutions.” (The biggest challenge in these multi-generational teams was the difference in communication preferences.)12
And contrary to stereotypes, older people are not by default afraid of new technology and less able to learn things. In fact, one study found that people over fifty five had less trouble working across multiple devices than eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds.13 Old dogs can learn new tricks.
The ability to work part-time, remotely, or with reduced hours with full pay, or even just having flexibility with start and finish times, can help people happily remain longer in the workforce, for their benefit and for the benefit of the economy, society, and the businesses for whom they work.
Gender Inequality, Domestic Violence, and Identity Challenges
The rigid workplace has a lot to answer for when it comes to gender inequality and a range of issues at home and in the workplace for both women and men.* It has also created a fissure between fathers and their children, between women and their lives, and between men and their identity (and health, and happiness).
In modern times, people in most countries have grown up in societies where there’s a great disparity between genders. Men have been the workers, spending most of their days working hard and then coming home to a few beers and dinner.
Women have been the caregivers, looking after kids, maybe squeezing in some low-quality, part-time work, and doing the majority of housework and management – also hard work, but never-ending and unpaid.
Because of the rigid nature of most workplaces, with long days and required presence at the workplace, the path of least resistance has been to have one person (usually the man) focusing purely on work and maintaining a secure, full-time job, and the other person (usually the woman) being unemployed or casually employed. Both are trapped.
Thus, we’ve had a stark division of labor at work and home, and deeply entrenched gender roles, resulting in the following issues for women, men, and children.
Issues for Women
1. Men end up with too much power over their partners because they earn most of the money, thus provide housing, food, and other things required for survival and security. Many men then feel entitled to control, and women have less power to negotiate, leave, or find quality work.
Domestic violence is inextricably linked to inequality both in the workplace and at home. On this topic, the Australian government, in its Fourth Action Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, states:
There is no single cause of violence against women and their children; however, gender inequality sets the stage for such violence to occur.
Evidence shows that the key beliefs and behaviors relating to gender that drive violence against women are:
• Condoning of violence against women
• Men’s control of decision-making and limits to women’s independence
• Stereotyped constructions of masculinity and femininity
• Disrespect towards women, and male peer relations that emphasise aggression14
2. Women have less opportunity for balance in life, which isn’t surprising given that, whether they work or not, they undertake the vast majority of household chores and management. “Worldwide, women carry out twice as much unpaid domestic and care work … as men.”15
A telling statistic from an Australian study is that women are 24 percent more likely than men to feel rushed “often” or “always” in their everyday lives. This feeling of consistently being rushed was found to be a barrier to physical activity as well as being associated with “poorer self-rated and mental health.”16
Rushing from task to task and fire to fire not only inhibits the ability of women to look after their health but it also gets in the way of fulfilling all of their human needs, such as the opportunity to fully use the mind in varied and concerted ways, feeling part of something bigger (having an identity beyond parenthood or work), rest and leisure, and so on.
3. The women who have “made it” in the rigid workplace have had to do so at great cost to themselves and their personal lives. They were essentially told that they had to embody “manliness” – being more ambitious, being stronger in negotiating, being bolder, asserting themselves (and other similar recommendations from Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In) – along with foregoing or delaying having a family.
Women have had to drive gender equality in the workplace, single-handedly, using their individual power in the face of systemic bias and discrimination. They have had to be superwomen, and as Michelle Obama put it in a recent speech, “that shit doesn’t work all the time.”17
Issues for Men
1. With less exposure to women, children, and caregiving (and to men who show respect to women), men don’t develop important aspects of their identity: empathy, love, and the ability to show emotions in healthy ways. They are then emotionally crippled, and they deal with this in problematic ways, such as aggression, drinking, drugs, talking in disrespectful ways about women, gambling and overeating, sexual immaturity, and notoriously high rates of suicide.
2. Being caught up in working so much, men have less time and energy to develop themselves in rounded ways by fulfilling their fundamental human needs, such as looking after their mental and physical health, learning, reading, relaxing, being with their children and/or partners, having quality male friendships, and using their minds outside of a work context. And they’re left with various poverties, which subsequently produce stress and a lack of well-being.
Rigid work has almost crippled men, creating a one-dimensional creature that’s incapable of realizing their full potential as both a man and a human. This identity is passed down to the next generations, as Tim Winton, author of Breath, describes vividly:
So many boys are learning how to be men from people who are really bad at being men…. I think boys just put themselves together from spare parts; and what’s closest to hand is often cheap and defective, and that makes it dangerous. They’re learning how to be bad men because there aren’t enough good men in their lives showing them how to be good men.18
Issues for Children
1. Fathers who have more work-family conflict – one of the results of working in rigid patterns – have poorer mental health, relationship quality, and parenting capabilities. All three of these influence a “child’s socio-emotional development and well-being independently of the mothers’ contributions.”19
2. With fathers and mothers divided into strict gender roles, children see and feel the power differences in their parents’ relationships. This affects how they perceive the relative values of men and women, which perpetuates gender stereotypes as the children grow up.
3. Kids are heavily affected by the domestic violence, caused partly by the power imbalance created by work rigidity, that they and their mothers face. With exposure to violence and abuse, these children are more likely to be perpetrators or victims of violence when they become adults, enforcing a cycle of abuse that lasts for generations.20
Having had to toil twice as hard to get decent work while having to do most of the housework and household management, women have been the major drivers of work flexibility for the last couple of decades.
They knew that it wasn’t enough to “lean in” and be superhuman to have it all. They knew there was a better way: If only I could structure my own day and week, I’d be able to get all this work done and be a mother!
And that was the answer: flexible work.
Being able to choose how, where, and when to get work done has been infinitely valuable to those who didn’t want to have to choose between decent work and having a family.
Women knew that they could be the CEO, or a member of parliament, or simply have well-paying, non-brain-numbing work, without putting off having a family. Women are, after all, fully capable multitaskers – they just needed to prove that it could be done.
After years of fighting for this right, it’s become somewhat normal for women to access flexibility in most organizations. This was the first step away from the problems above, at least for women, and the results speak.
An article by Remote.co, about how working remotely affects gender equality in the workplace, compared fifty-three fully remote companies (sixteen of which took part in interviews during the research) to large traditional companies and other startups. It was found that:
• Women make up 42 percent of the leadership at the sixteen remote companies that were interviewed (compared to 14.2 percent at S&P 500 companies).
• Of the fifty-three remote companies in the research, 28 percent have a female founder or co-founder (compared to 18 percent of all startups in 2014).
• Of those fifty-three remote companies, 19 percent have a female CEO (compared to 4 percent of S&P 500 companies).21
These incredible differences show that when women are free to get their work done without the rigidity of the old-fashioned boys club (where time at work is the most important measure of value), they’re empowered to get shit done and lead and start businesses.
In another study, done in the United Kingdom, researchers found that women “who were able to use flexitime [alter their start and finish times] were only half as likely to reduce their hours after the birth of their child.” And those who accessed remote work were also much less likely (by about 36 percent) to reduce their working hours after childbirth.22
Various other types of flexibility have enabled women to continue their careers without moving to lower-quality or less-senior roles. Job sharing, for instance, is being used with great success in high-level positions, and part-time work is being more commonly used in managerial roles.
But although increased flexibility for women has gone a long way to enable them to continue and succeed in their professional careers, many still end up facing the stigma of using that flexibility, resulting in discrimination called flexism.
When flexibility is still an exception in the workplace, when it’s used only by people who ask for it the loudest, such as women with caregiving responsibilities, it’s seen as a disruption to normal operation. It’s tolerated rather than accepted and celebrated. This creates the perception that those who use flexibility (women) have less commitment to their careers and companies.
A study by Bain and Company found that more men than women perceived that women’s careers are hindered by “competing priorities” (i.e., choosing to prioritize family over work), whereas the biggest reason given by women that they’re less often in senior positions is that they don’t fit the mold of the existing style of management.23
Men also miss out on the benefits of flexibility when it’s not allowed, even though many want and need it.24
More needs to be done. The next step is being taken, albeit slowly.
The Next Step
The word being used in companies at the more progressive end of workplace flexibility is normalization. They’ve become aware of the issues presented above regarding discrimination toward those who use flexibility, such as part-time work, flextime, and parental leave.
Companies have realized that if only some of the working population are allowed to use flexibility, the practice remains abnormal, unusual, the exception. And many of those who use flexibility are minorities, which leads to numerous issues (detailed in Chapter 8, where I talk about the differences between policies and programs). Normalizing flexibility is crucial in order to address the difficulties currently faced by women, men, and children.
And how do we normalize flexibility? Men.
Men need to be allowed to work flexibly when they request it and be encouraged to use it. The latter is important because it hasn’t been normal for men to use flexibility. They’re twice as likely as women to be rejected when they request a change in their work structures.25 And when they do so, they step out of what’s normal. This comes with risk to their careers and subsequently to their sense of identity and self-worth.
When a company steps up and decides to make flexibility normal for everyone, it kicks off an elegant and beautiful cycle for men, women, and children:
• Men: When men have greater flexibility, they can fulfill other important parts of their lives, such as pursuing passions, connecting more with family and friends, and having time to rest, relax, seek adventure, and fulfill all their needs in a sustainable way. They can also do more of the housework and household management, which helps break down traditional gender roles and increase equality. Flexibility reduces the burden on men to be the breadwinners, so they can fulfill their needs in a balanced way and become multidimensional and whole in their identities.
• Women: When companies freely offer flexibility, they have systems and training for optimal use of the practice, and there’s no stigma attached to using it. So women can fully realize their career goals, gain promotions, and increase their paychecks. And when men do more of the housework, women who have jobs will have more time to relax and fulfill other needs.
• Children: Kids get to spend more time with both mom and dad, neither of whom are stressed and run off their feet. Family time will be higher quality and intentional. Boys will learn how to be good, whole men from good, whole men – no missing or defective parts.
Breaking the trap of rigid work benefits us all!
One great example of the effects of allowing more men to access flexibility (and providing encouragement to take it up) is Iceland’s equal parental leave.
In 2000, Iceland’s government adopted a law that increased parental leave allowances from six to nine months. This leave is divided between mothers and fathers, with each given three months of nontransferable leave, with the remainder to be divided however the parents choose.26 The objective of the change was “to ensure that children get to spend time with both parents, and to enable both men and women to balance work and family life.”27
The results of this change were dramatic.
First, due to the nontransferable nature of the leave, the percentage of fathers who took parental leave increased from about 3 percent in 1997 to 90 percent in 2008, and it has hovered at about 80 percent in the years since – the Global Financial Crisis positively influenced labor security and the desire and ability to take leave.28
Second, men have developed better relationships with, and understanding of, their children in those important early months and years. One survey found that “72 percent of fathers say that taking parental leave has helped them to understand the needs of infants and 83 percent agree that taking paternal leave has increased their emotional connection with the child.”29 Another study by the World Health Organization found that, compared to earlier generations, children in Iceland today are much more likely to “discuss problems with daddy.”30
The third, and probably most important, result is that caregiving responsibilities were divided evenly between parents (for cohabiting couples) by the majority of parents, and this division lasted for the term of the study: three years after the birth of the child.31 Just three months of paternity leave changed family dynamics drastically in favor of a more equal standing, with effects not just in the home but in the workplace.
Another study found a “direct correlation between involved fatherhood and long-term relationship stability…. Fathers who took sole charge of babies before they turned one were as much as 40 percent less likely to subsequently break up with their partners.”32
The researchers stressed that it was difficult to pinpoint the cause and effect of this correlation, but, as British MP Jo Swinson said, “For couples where care is shared, not only does that couple have more in common, which can enhance the relationship, but it becomes a shared endeavour, which helps reduce stress.”33
Preventable Health Problems
People are living a lot longer now than ever before. But even though our life expectancy has increased dramatically, our quality of life, mentally and physically, hasn’t increased proportionately, and in some ways it’s getting worse. Our major killers and causes of disability and poor health are no longer infectious and parasitic diseases, as they were before the mid-twentieth century; they’re chronic, noncommunicable diseases, usually due to lifestyle and age.
In Australia, more than 70 percent of diseases are chronic, including musculoskeletal disease (e.g., arthritis), depression and anxiety, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and hypertension.34 And these chronic diseases are associated with one or more of the following lifestyle-related risk factors: poor diet, physical inactivity, alcohol, smoking, and stress.35
Globally, heart disease is the leading cause of death for both males and females, accounting for over 12 percent of all deaths;36 depression is the leading cause of disability;37 and in OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, over half of all adults are overweight or obese,38 a major contributor to many of the diseases above.
This section describes how our rigid workplaces play a large part in the development of these health issues, and how flexibility can be used to solve these problems and improve physical and mental health.
(I distinguish between mental and physical health in this section, as I have in other parts of this book, only to describe specific effects, but they’re so closely related and interdependent that I mostly talk about health in general. Edward Bullmore, author of The Inflamed Mind, makes the case that the traditional dualist perspective of separating mental health and physical health should no longer hold weight, since the brain is part of the body, and it’s been shown that stress, bodily inflammation, and depression are all connected.)
The Ten Riders of the Workapocalypse
Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his highly illuminating and deeply depressing book Dying for a Paycheck,39 introduced the term toxic workplaces to describe what I have referred to as rigid or traditional workplaces.
These workplaces, Pfeffer argues, create social pollution in the form of increased physical and mental health issues and premature death on an immense scale (one-hundred-twenty-thousand excess deaths per year in the United States alone, and over one million in China). These deaths are due to poor management processes in which humans are treated like robots, with society and individuals picking up the tab.
Pfeffer calls for a greater focus on “human sustainability” and offers solutions such as measuring the social pollution of businesses. He recommends publicly calling out those who fall below acceptable limits, in the same way we would name, shame, and punish an oil company responsible for a spill, and by celebrating those that do prioritize the health and well-being of their employees.
But there are ways that individual businesses can put their foot down and make a difference, today, without waiting for major policy changes or social pollution measurements and shaming. They can do it by implementing greater flexibility for employees and managers.
I want to show how flexibility gets directly to the root of the ten workplace exposures introduced by Pfeffer, which are, “with almost no exceptions, as harmful to health, including mortality and having a physician-diagnosed illness, as exposure to secondhand smoke, a known and regulated carcinogen.”
Of these “ten prominent workplace exposures related to employer decisions that affect human health and longevity,” flexibility addresses nine. Presented here are Pfeffer’s ten workplace exposures and how flexibility can go a long way to reduce the effects for almost all.
1. Being unemployed (sometimes a consequence of being laid off): Flexibility allows greater employment for, among others, women, people with disabilities, older people, and those who are geographically restricted. This directly reduces this exposure for many demographics.
Flexibility also allows someone who already has a job more opportunities to upskill and decentralize their work, so that when that dreaded “restructuring” letter arrives from HR, there will be less of an impact. The employee will have the skills and connections to find new employment faster, and/or they’ll already have supplemental income.
2. Not having health insurance: This one isn’t relevant except for the fact that flexibility, by improving mental and physical health, reduces the need for health care and the level of insurance required by employees. (But, of course, being able to access medical services should be a fundamental right for all humans regardless of employment status!)
3. Working shifts and working for longer than the customary eight hours: One of the tenets of flexibility, especially in this book, is to reduce the daily and weekly hours of work, including (and especially) for shift workers. Reducing hours can be done in a way that doesn’t hurt the business, that’s mutually beneficial, and that considers humans as humans rather than robots. The following chapters explore the link between flexibility and productivity.
4. Working long hours in a week (i.e., more than forty hours): As with the previous exposure, flexibility is about moving the focus away from hours worked and putting it onto value created, so we move away from cultures of working long hours for the sake of working long hours, which are prolific in modern society.
5. Confronting job insecurity (e.g., because colleagues have been laid off or fired): By giving people more time and energy, flexibility allows people to have other pursuits, and it allows them to upskill in other areas, thus expanding their work options, both of which create greater job and income security.
People often report higher engagement levels with their work when they have access to flexibility. Higher engagement levels lead to greater productivity and creativity. This increases employees’ value to their businesses, which increases their job security.
6. Facing family-to-work and work-to-family conflicts: Out of the ten, this exposure had, by far, the largest effect on physical and mental health. Flexibility is the best way to reduce this conflict, and it was originally used mainly by parents (usually mothers) who needed and/or wanted to work and have children. When the rigidity of work is decreased, either in location or hours, it’s easier for people to handle their family needs, thus reducing the stress guilt of not being able to give their best to their jobs and their families.
7. Having relatively low control over one’s job and job environment, including having relatively little freedom and decision discretion at work: Freedom is one of our fundamental needs. Starving this need is bad news for our health, hence it’s no surprise to see it as one of the top harmful workplace exposures.
Flexibility, which means focusing on results, and allowing autonomy with how, where, and when work is completed, helps people feel in control at work.
8. Facing high job demands such as pressure to work fast: Some might argue that flexibility, such as working fewer hours in a day, might increase the pressure to work fast, but it actually relieves that pressure.
It reduces the pressures associated with normal workplace structures, such as long commutes, long meetings, distractions by co-workers, and sitting in an open-plan office with constant surveillance (called inferred pressure). And it creates a culture of job effectiveness and continuous improvement by reducing wasted resources and time. Instead of working fast and being busy, people think about whether a task is necessary and find better ways to do things, which reduces demands and their resulting pressure.
9. Being in a work environment that offers low levels of social support (for instance, not having close relationships with coworkers, relationships that would provide social support to mitigate the effects of work stress): Flexibility, especially remote work, might be seen as contributing to this problem, since it involves a risk of low social interaction and support at work. But flexibility enables greater social networks to be developed outside of work, which, since you can choose that social network rather than being forced into one at work, might be higher quality and provide greater support.
Social isolation can be a problem with remote work, but the chapter on how to roll out flexibility provides solutions.
10. Working in a setting in which job- and employment-related decisions seem unfair: Decisions that people would feel are unjust are those that add to their feeling of being pressured, such as being given too much work, being given work that an employee isn’t qualified to do, support being taken away, or changes in work hours or locations without the employee’s input. These issues can be resolved with a more flexible approach to work.
Why do each of these exposures affect our health in the first place?
Stress.
Each one of these exposures, and other workplace exposures, including harassment and bullying, terrible bosses, and commuting to and from work, induces stress, usually over the long term because many of these exposures are consistently present in rigid workplaces. This long-term stress harms our health in two major ways: directly and by inducing poor health behaviors, such as increased use of drugs, alcohol, and McDonald’s, and decreased use of gyms, nutritious food, walking trails, and cycling paths.
Direct Harm
In the same way that work itself isn’t the devil, stress isn’t inherently bad. It’s a useful motivator. Without any sort of stress, we would likely lie down and slowly (or quickly) die. Stress stimulates us to act.
Being hungry gets us to look for food. Smelling smoke tells us that a fire is nearby, and we should investigate it or leave the area. A tiger jumping out from behind a bush causes us to run faster than normally possible. The stress of our own internal motivation, or the competition with someone at sport or at work, can drive us to greater levels of achievement. Stress is a bad thing when it’s high and never-ending: chronic stress, which is useless and only leads to poor health and unhappiness.
When we’re stressed, our bodies physically prepare us to take action: to either stand our ground and face the stressor (fight) or to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible (flight). It does this by elevating our heart rate, directing blood to move away from our internal organs and toward the muscles in our limbs – the tools most useful for running and fighting – priming us to defend our survival. It also releases chemicals that increase our alertness, such as adrenaline and cortisol.
Very few things in the natural world create unending stress. A tiger attack or flood are normally over pretty quickly. The rigid workplace, on the other hand, does create unending stress – for eight or more hours a day, forty eight to fifty two weeks a year, from our early twenties until we retire or die. That’s depressing.
Just being at work for most of the day, travelling to and from work, and the associated poverties of human needs, cause relentless stress for many of us. We’re chronically in this fight-or-flight state, with increased heart rates, blood directed away from our major organs, and increased levels of adrenaline and cortisol.
The damage this does is immense. Our blood pressure is permanently increased and arteries are hardened. Cortisol breaks down cells and causes inflammation. And our health in general suffers.40
This stress also changes our behavior.
Not only does the rigid workplace increase the direct effects of stress on our bodies, it also reduces our capacity to make good decisions about our health.
Richard H. Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017 for his work in behavioral economics, specifically on the psychology of individual decision-making, and even more specifically for his development of nudge theory. Nudge theory, in a nutshell, proposes that people’s decisions can be influenced by subtle psychological tricks or cues or by reshaping the choices available to them. With nudges, a person’s free will and choices aren’t removed, but because human behavior is predictable, it’s much more likely that the tricks or cues will encourage someone to choose one thing over another.
This is a powerful tool that can be used for good or for evil. In the right hands, it can help people save more money, stop speeding, eat healthier food, and stop smoking. In the wrong hands, well, just ask the advertising and marketing industries.
With a few strategically placed signs or television ads, or big yellow arches next to a main road, people can choose oil-drenched food with little nutritional value over cooking at home, impacting both their waistlines and their wallets.
Or they can fall into the world of gambling by downloading a sports betting app after being bombarded by an endless parade of gambling ads.
Or they may apply for yet another credit card to receive a temporary zero-percent interest on balance transfers because of a promotional email; banks know that this balance won’t be paid in time and they’ll make their money anyway.
Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, believe that there’s a dichotomous world of decision makers. First is the perfectly rational and perfectly fictitious Homo economicus, who makes decisions based on infinite information and resources, and who can unfailingly predict the outcomes of their decisions, and thus will always make the optimal choice for their subjective needs or goals.41
They will be fully aware and knowledgeable of the long-term health and financial costs of eating a burger and large fries for dinner, decide that the costs outweigh the short-term satisfaction of eating something glistening and salty, and go home and cook a cheaper and more nutritious meal.
And then there are humans. Real humans have limited time, energy, information, material resources, and understanding of the impacts of our choices; we have biologically programmed biases that cause us to quickly jump to conclusions with that limited information; we favor short-term pleasure or rewards over long-term goals; and we tend to be self-centered.
What this means is that humans tend to make pretty crappy decisions for our long-term health and finances, the environment, and other people, exemplified by our current obesity epidemic, plastic pollution, global warming, and other bad stuff humans have done and are doing to ourselves and the world.
I’m feeling pretty bold today, so I’m going to challenge one of the concepts put forth by this Nobel Prize winner and his colleague, the one that says that humans are generally useless at making their own decisions.
Humans are capable of so much more.
I don’t believe that there’s a dualist “perfect and fictional Homo economicus” and “perfectly flawed human,” between which exists nothing. I believe, rather, that there’s a spectrum of human capability, on which each of us moves up and down according to our internal resources (energy) and external resources (time and money).
On one day, Bob is fully capable of driving past the big yellow arches, going for a jog, and then cooking a nutritious meal; on another day, Bob, drained of time and energy after a long, stressful day, succumbs to the convenience and glistening sheen of fast food, and gets two burgers and a large serving of fries with a big glass of sugar water to wash it all down.
Thaler himself agrees that it’s because of our lack of resources that we make imperfect decisions; he thinks the best solution is to increase the making of good decisions through nudges. But what about the other part of the equation? What about increasing our resources so that we’re able to make better decisions ourselves?
I’m not refuting the effectiveness and usefulness of nudges. I’m saying that increasing the resources of humans to enable them to make better decisions can have fantastic results, especially in the realm of personal health. Well-being programs at work are examples of using nudges to improve health outcomes, often without consideration of human resources and capability.
Many businesses around the world try to encourage better health decisions by their employees by providing helpful nudges: bowls of free fruit in meeting rooms, free fitness classes, educational pamphlets about sleep and vegetables, and tracking number of steps and rewarding top steppers.
In the United States, especially, where employers have the burden of paying for health insurance and thus have a strong financial reason to have healthier employees, well-being programs are almost ubiquitous in firms with two hundred or more employees.42
But while businesses are providing helpful nudges, many of those same businesses are sucking up people’s resources through rigid work practices, making it harder for employees to make good decisions about their health in the first place.
Have you ever been stuck in traffic after a long, stressful day and still felt like going to the gym? Even if your employer is paying for it? Even if there’s a poster on the wall at work listing the top ten benefits of exercise?
I find most corporate well-being programs to be at best creepy and patronizing and at worst a terrible invasion of privacy and an encroachment on personal freedoms. Over half (55 percent) of large firms that offer health benefits to employees in the United States offer biometric screening, such as blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and BMI, to measure workers’ health risks, and, “increasingly, companies are also imposing penalties for employees who do not improve on various biometric and lifestyle measures [italics added, because holy shit!].”43
(This also opens up new doors for discrimination, such as not hiring or promoting people with increased health risks, such as being older, having a disability, or being overweight.)
A company in Japan called Crazy is using nudges to fight against its country’s “sleep debt” by incentivizing sleep. Because of a culture of sacrifice and unwavering commitment to the companies they work for, people in Japan often work incredibly long hours compared to other countries, and as a result they end up sleeping far less than the recommended seven to eight hours. This deprivation causes ill health and mortality rates resulting in a reported $138 billion loss to Japan’s economy yearly.44
Crazy is trying to help. Employees’ sleep habits are tracked by an app on their smart phones, which draws data from sensors embedded in their mattresses. If they consistently manage to sleep more than six hours per night during the week, they can accumulate a financial reward of ¥64,000 (US$594) in a year. This wellness initiative has been mirrored by several other companies, including Teijin and Hitachi, who track and reward not just sleep but also physical activity.45
As wonderful as this may seem – helping employees improve their health and lives through data and incentives – it again disregards the fact that businesses are the root cause for their employees’ lack of sleep.
When we nudge people to get enough sleep, aren’t we forgetting that humans are naturally adept at sleeping? Most of us even enjoy it! It’s something we’ve been doing since we were living in trees, long before corporations and well-being programs existed.
Many people, not just in Japan but around the world, stopped getting enough sleep because of long, rigid hours of work and management cultures that supported and allowed these practices to become normal. (Occasionally the problem is crying babies or barking dogs, but mostly it’s the work thing).
I say fuck that! Before any business managers have the gall to say they’re looking after workers with fitness programs or biometric testing or sleep tracking, they need to stand up, hold their hands on their hearts, and declare that there’s nothing else they can do to ensure that they’re not hurting those workers’ abilities to be healthy. Before bringing in the fitness trainers and sleep devices, here’s a completely free and highly successful well-being program summarized in three sentences:
1. Ensure that work isn’t taking up all your employees’ time and energy.
2. Ensure that employees have the freedom and flexibility to prioritize their health.
3. Employees will then have the capability to make good choices themselves.*
It’s evident that various forms of flexibility would help improve people’s health-related behaviors.
Reducing hours per day or days per week at work increases the time to do other things, including sleep and exercise. Working remotely reduces the time and stress of commuting and frees employees to plan and structure their days, both of which increase their chances of sleeping and exercising more and cooking good food.
But here’s some evidence!
One study linked various (rigid) workplace factors to reduced ability to sleep. It found that:
• Lack of choice in daily work routine caused people to sleep, on average, 2.3 minutes less per day than those reporting more choice at work.
• Unrealistic time pressures and stress at the workplace caused people to sleep eight minutes less per day.
• People who work irregular hours (e.g., shift work) sleep 2.7 minutes less per day.
• People who commute between thirty and sixty minutes each way to work sleep 9.2 minutes less per day than those with a commute each way of zero to fifteen minutes. People who commute each way over sixty minutes sleep 16.5 minutes less per day than those with shorter commutes.46
The authors note that although these seem like small effects, they’re cumulative; i.e., someone who’s affected by all of these, which isn’t uncommon for rigid workplaces, may be missing out on nearly half an hour of sleep every day, which is enough to have a dramatic effect on their health.
Another study, which, conversely, looked at the effects of flexible work on sleep behavior, found that people with a results-only work environment* slept almost an hour (52.3 minutes) more per day than those with a traditional work structure. Of the 52.3 minutes, twenty minutes were a direct consequence of ROWE – people had more time to sleep – and thirty-two minutes were an indirect consequence – people had greater schedule control and less negative work-home spillover.47
Almost an extra hour per day of sleep is life changing, and no bribery was required.
Many people are fully aware of how much their health and lives are affected by rigid workplaces, and conversely how much flexibility could help. In a survey of over three thousand workers,48 most of whom were professionals, 77 percent of respondents said that “having a flexible job would allow them to be healthier (eat better, exercise more, etc.) and 86 percent said they’d be less stressed.” Another study found that remote workers exercised more, by twenty-five minutes per week, than in-office employees.49
Spiral Up
Aside from helping us not get fat and die prematurely, flexibility can turn the whole health picture upside down, into something positive and multi-colored.
When we begin living sustainably, when work isn’t the all-conquering force in our lives, we can start to develop better personal knowledge and habits.
The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”50 There is a continuum of health ranging from total ill health to total health51 (or from “dead to Superman,” as my chiropractor Dr. Adam East more colorfully puts it).
When we’re sick or injured enough that we decide to do something about it, a doctor or pharmacist will treat that sickness or injury enough so that it’s no longer a problem, or it’s less of a problem than it was. But the health journey is so much more than not being sick or injured. It’s the accumulation of everyday things that either improve or damage our health over time, and thus dictates our overall position on the health spectrum.
Greater work flexibility enables a reduction in things that damage our health (e.g., stress) and an increase in those things that improve our health (e.g., adequate sleep), allowing us to spiral up this continuum of health. This leads not only to higher quality of life, but also to less illness and disease in the future.
In addition to increasing our time and energy, flexible work provides greater freedom to structure the day the way we want and to do health-related activities without judgment. Some things that are great for health are quite unacceptable, or illegal, to do in an office. Examples of those things go well beyond just exercising, sleeping more, and eating better:
Figure 4.1. Doctors and pharmacists treat poor health, which is when people have symptoms such as pain and depression. But the journey to better health is more nuanced than simply alleviating obvious symptoms. Upward spiral!
• Mindfulness and meditation, practicing gratitude and forgiveness, yoga, tai-chi, breathing exercises, humming loudly or singing to stimulate the vagus nerve
• Dancing! – alone or with a partner
• More sex, and time for proper lovemaking and intimate connection, even just with yourself; healing of sexual trauma and learning about the body
• Relaxation: watching kids play, reading a book, listening to music, sitting on the grass in the sun, being idle and doing nothing, all undervalued in modern society
• Addressing chronic back and hip pain through visits to chiropractors or physiotherapists and finding and fixing the root causes for these pains instead of just living with them
• Ripping off your shirt and stretching or doing lunges in the sun for twenty minutes while you consider a tricky section of a quarterly report
• Learning how to reduce dependency on social media, focusing more on your own life and creating and fostering true connections with family, friends, community, and nature
• Addressing childhood or other trauma – the cause of many physical and mental ailments – through therapy and/or research
• Reducing other sources of stress, be it family conflict or financial issues, by focusing on setting life straight rather than rushing from fire to fire at the end of the day
• Going to the dentist (Poor dental health affects the heart and mental health, and many of us leave the dentist off the calendar until we have a serious problem. For many it’s a cost issue, but for others it’s low on the list of priorities of everyday activities.)
• Learning how to cook decent food, giving yourself options that will make you proudly scoff every time you pass the golden arches
• Figuring out which fundamental needs may be chronically unfulfilled, and then filling them regularly
• Building your knowledge about your own health
All of these activities, and many more, create resilience, all influence each other for the better, all increase our quality of life. And all move us up the spectrum toward being health superhumans.
I’ll end this section with a quick story.
I haven’t been sick for over three years.
OK, maybe I’ve had one small cold.
But since leaving the rigid workplace and working with full flexibility, I haven’t had those debilitating illnesses I would consistently get at least two or three times a year, the ones that put me out of action for a few days or an entire week, or caused me to have a chest cough that lingered for months. I honestly can’t remember what it even feels like to be that sick. (Fate, come at me!)
Part of the reason for my improved health could be that I spend less time in workplaces, so I might be exposed to fewer germs. But I spend time around the general population doing other things, so I don’t think that’s it.
I believe it’s because my bodily systems aren’t constantly stretched to the limit because I’m able to look after my health every day. I’ve reduced or removed stressors and many associated terrible health decisions, and the good things I do every day for my fundamental needs combine to push me toward health resilience.
Not only have I rarely been sick in the last two years, but my health has improved in other incredible ways (TMI warning!):
• My libido is higher now, in my mid-thirties, than it was for much of my twenties, which, for a man, is the opposite of what it should be.
• My lower back pain (from sitting too much while commuting and being stagnant at a desk) is mostly gone, and I can sprint and jump again – I thought those days were over.
• The flexibility in my limbs is better than it’s been in over a decade.
• I hardly ever feel the need to self-medicate in the form of alcohol, pornography, or videogames.
• And I’m experiencing less depression, having attained a state of consistent contentment. (I don’t strive for happiness, since I think this is a fleeting emotion, but rather for deep satisfaction.) The black cloud does still occasionally hit, but I have the time and knowledge now to take care of it, so its effects are much lessened. I have greater resilience.
Who knows what other changes are going on inside my body, and which future problems have been averted?
The moral of this story is that, because of flexibility, I have the time and energy to prioritize my own health, and that has changed my life.
Traffic Congestion and Pollution
In 2017, traffic congestion cost the U.S. economy $305 billion ($33.7 billion in New York City alone).52 This cost comprises the lost productive hours of people stuck in traffic, increased cost of goods transportation, wasted fuel, the social cost of extra pollution, and various other factors.
In the United Kingdom, this figure was £37 billion (US$46 billion); in London it was £9.5 billion (US$11.8 billion).
In Germany it was €16.4 billion (US$9.2 billion).
In Australia it was A$16.5 billion (US$10.6 billion).53
But honestly, who cares? Do you? Do you know what $305 billion looks like? Have you ever held that much money in your hands? Does it affect your everyday life if your country collectively loses that money?
Sure, it adds to the prices of our groceries and products through increased transport costs, but it’s not something we really notice. No one says, “Why the hell are my chips $3.50 now? They were $3.40 last year. Bloody traffic!”
What we do notice is the everyday pain.
We wake up earlier and earlier, having our precious sleep stolen by that damned alarm, just so we can get ready and make it onto the road before it starts clogging up.
We feel the frustration of having our travel time blown out by random and increasingly frequent traffic jams that add thirty minutes to an hour to our trip, making us late for work even after we leave home super early. And when we get to the front of the queue we find that it was caused by … nothing?! Often it’s a phantom traffic jam, created by the butterfly effect of small variations in driving behavior – someone brakes slightly for the car in front, causing the next person to brake a little more, and so on, and that builds up to gridlock.
We feel impotent anger when we finish a long day of work, and we just want to get home to our loved ones, but another minor accident or breakdown has brought the motorway to a standstill. We sit in our cars, listening to traffic reports, wishing we were somewhere else, anywhere else, and wondering if this job is really worth it, and pondering if there’s more to life.
It stings us when we put gas in our cars and for some unknown reason the price has mysteriously jumped up by forty cents from what it was yesterday. But what can we do? Not put gas in the car? Not go to work?
A survey of fifteen-thousand professionals from eighty countries found that 40 percent of respondents said that the daily commute was the worst part of their day, and one in five were regularly late for work due to travel disruptions.54
In summary, traffic sucks.
The same solutions to congestion come up over and over again in the news, and during political elections, and at town hall meetings: new roads, better public transport, congestion charges, and, increasingly, ride-hailing (such as Uber), and autonomous vehicles.
This is a solution that appeals to our logical minds: more road equals more space for more cars equals congestion gone. It’s wonderful in its simplicity, hence it remains one of the most popular promises to frustrated commuters. Shall I list some of the problems with this solution?
• Roads are expensive to build or expand, often in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for even a section of highway.
• Roadworks create congestion by blocking lanes or reducing speed limits for as long as it takes to build.
• They take a long time to build, usually years.
• Expanding the capacity of a roadway tends to induce more people to drive or to live further away from work, which results in increased pollution and use of resources, and, soon after, the same (or worse) congestion than before the expansion.55
Public Transport
This has an important place in improving the movement of the masses. But it’s only one part of the overall answer.
In a country like Australia, where people prefer the personal comfort and freedom that a car provides, and towns and cities are spread over large areas, public transport will account for only a small percentage of commuters. And the rideshare of one of the main public transport modes, buses, is heavily affected by congestion.
When congestion worsens, people prefer to be in their cars rather than sitting on a bus because service becomes delayed and erratic56 (which again increases congestion, which causes more people to not use the buses, and so on, in a spiral of traffic-y doom). It’s difficult to reverse the trend of congestion by getting more people onto a service that’s affected by that very congestion, so getting rid of congestion requires other solutions.
Ride-Hailing Services
Contrary to Uber’s claim that it helps reduce congestion, it’s actually increasing congestion. Traffic congestion in San Francisco, for instance, increased by 60 percent between 2010 and 2016, with Uber and Lyft vehicles responsible for more than half of that increase.57
It’s not hard to see why this happens. If the cost of an Uber ride is only marginally more expensive than, say, taking a bus or a train, yet has the advantage of being a privately chauffeured ride directly to a destination, a certain number of people will leave public transport (or their bike, or their walking shoes) to be the sole passenger in a vehicle that takes up space on the road, on the way to that destination, and on the way out.
In other words, Uber isn’t just replacing people driving their own cars; it’s increasing the number of car trips, thus increasing traffic. Recent studies show that “43 percent to 61 percent of [ride-hail] trips substitute for transit, walk, or bike travel or would not have been made at all.”58
Autonomous Vehicles
The people waiting for a fleet of autonomous vehicles (where we have mobility as a service (MaaS), similar to electricity or water service) to save the day are likely to be disappointed.
The car company Audi, after conducting research on traffic flow in Ingolstadt, Germany, surmises that “a city with 100 percent self-driving cars will reduce commute times by a third, even with 10 percent more vehicles on the road”;59 which isn’t a terrible result, but it shows that self-driving cars will only be one piece of the congestion puzzle. They’re not a silver bullet, especially because it will take some time, probably decades, before we reach 100 percent and finally ban silly humans from clogging up the roads with their imperfect reaction speeds and temper tantrums.
We’re going to look in more detail at two other traffic solutions, both of which are forms of demand management – reducing demand on existing roadways by changing travel times or reducing or eliminating travel:
• Congestion pricing is one of these solutions, heralded by many as the most feasible one for major cities, and it has already been utilized with considerable success.
• Flexible work is a magnificent beast that’s quietly flying under the radar: specifically remote work and flextime.
We’re going to look at these from the perspective of one person – Rahul. Rahul lives in Brisbane, Australia. He’s a normal, everyday sort of dude who has a job and a partner and a kid. Rahul works on the opposite side of the city from where he lives, about a forty-minute drive from home. His partner’s workplace is only about five minutes from home, and their child goes to a nearby school. It’s also a great neighborhood, so this is where they’ve decided to stay for the foreseeable future.
But Rahul hates his morning and afternoon commutes. Every second or third day there’s bound to be heavy, inexplicable congestion, blowing his trip out from forty minutes to over an hour and a half, so he leaves quite early to avoid being late. (The traffic-was-shit excuse can only be used a certain number of times before people start to raise their eyebrows.)
He never gets enough sleep; he never has breakfast with his family; he rarely feels like exercising or doing anything other than eating and watching Netflix by the time he gets home; he can’t remember the last time he just relaxed at home; he feels stressed when he gets to the office, so he doesn’t feel like he’s doing his best work; and he’s pretty close to just slamming his foot on the brakes the next time someone decides to tailgate his car.
If he wanted to get out of the traffic and take public transport, his only other really viable way of getting to work, he’d have to drive to the local train station, transfer to a bus, and then walk the final ten minutes to the office. He tried it once and it took him, door-to-door, over an hour and forty minutes. When he returned home that night, nearly twelve hours after leaving, he swore off it forever. “Screw global warming!”
So, he continues to drive.
Punishing the Driver
In comes congestion pricing.
The government has been toying with this idea for a while after realizing that something different needs to happen to turn the tide of worsening congestion. It’s choking the cities and impacting their growth and liveability. Building new roads is expensive, takes a long time, and hasn’t worked. In fact, people seem to materialize from nowhere and fill up each new road within a couple of years of its opening. Charging people to drive at peak hours seems to have reduced traffic in other countries. “Let’s do it!” they said.
Fast forward through whatever long-winded processes are required to get to the point where Rahul is now being charged to drive on the main roads he needs to take to get to his office. He pays A$20 per day,60 or $100 per week, or $400 per month, or $4,800 per year, in congestion charges. Rahul is paid reasonably well (one of the reasons he’s determined to stay in his current job), but this charge, on top of his fuel, other road tolls, and maintenance of his car, is starting to impact his savings. There goes the house he was hoping to buy someday.
He wonders what he can do. He could go back to his long public transport trips, which would save money. Even though he’d have a lot less time with his family, he could be productive on the train – do some extra reading and whatnot. Maybe.
The congestion charges apply only during peak hours, so he considers asking his boss if he could start earlier and then finish earlier. No. He knows his company. He knows his boss. Not only would they say no before the question had left Rahul’s mouth, it would make them question Rahul’s commitment to the company’s mission and values. It would hurt them to have employees come to the office at whatever damned time they want. Who would manage them? It’d be chaos!
Rahul does some digging for solutions and finds a communal ride-sharing website where he could pay a small fee and catch a ride with another driver, or he could earn some money by picking someone else up. Being adventurous, he decides to create an account. Unfortunately, he doesn’t find anyone going from his location to his destination and gives up after a few weeks.
Just to recap, Rahul’s commuting options are:
• Pay an extra $4,800 a year in congestion charges to continue driving to work.
• Spend an extra two or more hours per day commuting by public transport, resulting in a total commute of more than three hours per day, or more than fifteen hours per week, putting him in the super-commuter category,* not a good category to find oneself in.
• Potentially risk his job and career by asking for flexible start and finish times in a rigid workplace.
• Use ride-share when a convenient sharer finally becomes available, and then find that it’s not convenient to depend on a stranger to consistently be on time, and to be consistently on time himself, because life and stuff happens.
• Find a new job closer to home that pays less and/or isn’t in his chosen field.
• Move the whole family closer to his work, requiring his kid to change schools and his partner to either find a new job or do the same commute in the opposite direction.
The technical term for this is being stuck between a rock and a hard place and a spiky thing and some other unpleasant object. Yet another term is choosing the least of several evils.
Don’t get me wrong – marginal changes to a system can produce the desired effects for at least part of a population. There will be some people who are near convenient public transport, or within walking or biking distance, but have chosen to drive because they love their sweet wheels (Australia is renowned for its love of the motor vehicle), and a congestion charge will push them to seriously consider leaving their cars at home. Positive results have been found in cities where it has been implemented – Stockholm, London, Milan, and Singapore; each has had large drops in traffic volume in the city centers. But even though congestion charges have had some success, it has some problems.
For instance, there are many people, like Rahul, who don’t have other viable and convenient travel options. With a congestion charge they’re forced to make a large compromise one way or another, be it financial, domestic, or health-related, or, more likely, all of these in varying measures. It’s a disincentive, a punishment. Mixing metaphors, it’s like using a big stick to herd cats.
It also does nothing to address the root cause of commuting in the first place – people need to get to work, regardless of whether they’re paying more to do so. On top of that, a congestion charge takes several years to implement, at great cost, and people may just take different routes, thus still polluting and causing congestion on non-charged roads.
Flexible Work, Flexible Roads
Let’s look at a different, and currently fictional, scenario. The Australian government, instead of going with the congestion pricing strategy, decided, after a compelling speech from a progressive back-bencher, that it would try something that’s completely new on the world stage: incentivizing companies to provide flexibility, remote work in this case, for their employees.
The government has created a National Flex Fund, which provides businesses with tax breaks of $2,000 for each employee who can demonstrate that they regularly work remotely or travel outside of peak times.
The aim of the fund is to make more businesses mindful of their impact on the roads, and to spread the awareness of work flexibility in general it offers various other health, social, and productivity benefits that carry over to government spending.
The size of the fund for Brisbane alone is $100 million, a drop in the bucket compared to the billions spent on road upgrades and other traffic costs. (The widening of a section of the highway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast is estimated to cost over one billion dollars.)61
Rahul’s firm, although quite traditional in its management style, was attracted by the tax breaks and decided to take part. Rahul, with his terrible commute, was one of the first to put up his hand when asked for remote work volunteers. He was accepted for a trial, and he’s now working three days a week from home, or sometimes from a local coworking hub that’s only five minutes from his home when he gets sick of his desk at home and needs to see other faces.
He saw the benefits immediately. On his first remote workday he slept an hour longer than usual, and then cooked breakfast for his family, and then sat and ate with them. He then walked his kid to school for the first time ever. Upon getting home, he opened his laptop and got to work, feeling refreshed, half an hour earlier than he normally would at the office. After a hugely productive and relatively uninterrupted day, he went down to the park for a run, at the same time he would normally be sitting in traffic. He finished off the day with a deeply present and engaged evening with his family.
After a while of this, Rahul’s health is improving – he gets more sleep, exercise, and home-cooked meals, and less stress. His connections with his kid and partner are growing, and he’s helping out a lot more at home, with duties such as cleaning and household management, like keeping track of appointments and his kid’s events. He’s saving $35 per day when telecommuting ($10 on fuel, $5 on tolls, $20 on coffees and lunch), which is a savings of $105 per week, or $5,040 per year for a forty-eight-week work year.
He has also lessened his carbon footprint by preventing over 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere over the course of a year (based on driving sixty kilometers a day and the average car emitting 182 grams of CO2 per kilometer).62
Rahul is also more energized at his job, even on the days he goes back into the office (with a renewed appreciation for time with his coworkers and the novelty of working in different locations). His manager has seen a marked uptick in his performance and enthusiasm for his next projects, and Rahul has been asking for more responsibility.
Besides the plethora of benefits for Rahul and his family, the least of which is escaping the stress of traffic a few days a week, removing people in large numbers from the road can make incredible differences to congestion, the main aim of the National Flex Fund.
Rahul is one of four-hundred employees from his firm who now work remotely more than half the week, and he’s one of fifty thousand in his city who are experiencing the direct benefits of less commuting, more freedom, and not contributing to traffic (and saving thousands of tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere).
There are about six-hundred-fifty-thousand people in Brisbane who drive to work.63 So the reduction of fifty-thousand drivers equates to 7.7 percent fewer people being on the roads in peak traffic times. This may not sound like it would have any effect on overall congestion, but it has been found that even small changes in traffic volume can have incredible effects.
For example, one study that analyzed the impact of public transport strikes on traffic found that the temporary increase in the number of cars on the roads by 7 percent (due to train strikes in Melbourne) resulted in a hugely disproportionate increase in congestion; namely, the number of severely congested roads in the city increased by 133 percent, 58 percent more vehicles experienced congestion, and the average travel speed across the network decreased by 20 percent (actual travel time increased by 73 percent).64
That’s a bad day.
Conversely, some studies report that reducing traffic by just 4 to 5 percent can increase average travel speed and decrease congestion substantially, by up to 30 percent.65
Here’s why this happens. Traffic flow is determined by driving speed and traffic density (number of cars per unit distance per lane). Roads have a maximum flow rate of cars above which the flow becomes unstable, and even a slight disturbance, such as someone slowing down to change lanes, can result in stop-and-go traffic or complete gridlock. Below this maximum flow rate, traffic moves smoothly.66
If a road often jams because there are too many cars trying to drive at once, reducing the number of cars even by a small percentage can put the flow rate below its maximum, and then traffic becomes stable and can flow easily.
Increasing the percentage of the workforce that works from home, or reducing their days of work, or changing their start and finish times, can help immensely with traffic flow during peak times by reducing the demand for the roads at these times. The less rigid our workplaces become, the less rigid our road demand becomes. Put another way, flexible work creates flexible roads!
There is an elasticity to traffic when people have more freedom to choose when or if they travel. Road use becomes an elastic market. If someone travels to work at a particular time and notices that traffic is becoming bad at that time, they could choose another time to travel or avoid traveling in general.
Not only does the worker benefit, but the road at that time will be less busy, and all the other drivers will benefit as well. This is what congestion pricing attempts to do through punishment (increased costs), but flexibility allows it to happen in a positive, non-punish-y sort of way, and at much less (or zero) cost to implement. And it can happen right now.
Why isn’t flexibility already the top contender for reducing congestion? Why aren’t we reading this headline: “Road crisis: government seeks companies to take up flexibility.” Why aren’t city planning documents filled with strategies to incentivize flexible work? Compared to all other solutions, it’s cheap, fast, simple, and reduces pollution; no one loses and everyone wins.
The issue is that there’s a vast disconnect between the people working to reduce congestion (traffic engineers, construction companies, politicians), who focus mainly on increasing the capacity of roads and other technical stuff like traffic light timing or congestion charges, and the people who have control over travel demand at peak times (business owners and managers).
It’s not a traffic engineer’s job to find out why people are using the road in the first place, much less help reduce that demand. It’s their job to build bigger and better intersections and roads. Their underlying assumption is that lots of people need to use the roads, and their goal is to provide the best infrastructure.
On the other side, businesses don’t see themselves as being responsible for traffic. Or if they’re aware of their contribution to traffic, they don’t think that their one business could make any difference. Furthermore, there’s no obvious short-term incentive for businesses to pay attention to their role in congestion, even when they see the direct negative results in stressed and late employees and increased freight costs.
That’s why flexibility doesn’t come up as a solution. It’s not easy to see the connection between work and traffic, and the incentives for any one stakeholder aren’t clear.
“We’re going to work with local businesses to create elastic demand for roads” is more abstract and less catchy than “We’re going to spend a billion dollars on a new highway!”
I hope that this little story about Rahul has made the connection between flexibility and traffic problems clear to government and business leaders. And whenever you see congestion on the news, or politicians promise new roads in a political campaign, or you’re crawling through traffic on your way to work, think of Rahul, and think of the magnificent beast of flexible work. We can bust this bastard one flexible business at a time.
* Compared to people who are still working, controlling for age and all factors besides retirement.
* When talking about men and women, I acknowledge that these issues apply to LGBTQ couples to differing degrees when they’re split along traditional gender roles at work and home.
* I believe there is a place for a business to help employees with extra health and well-being initiatives, such as free itness classes, greener workspaces, more natural light, and mental wellness support, but these must be used in conjunction with reducing the potential harm of psychosocial effects caused by workplace rigidity.
* ROWE (results-only work environment), as described in Chapter 2: people can choose when and where (and how) to complete their work. The only thing measured is what is produced or completed.
* Over ten hours of commuting per week.
