How Not To Flex
BY THIS POINT YOU MIGHT FEEL INSPIRED because you know that flexibility can make employees feel like they’ve won the lottery, help reduce traffic jams and domestic violence, add years to people’s lives, and increase profits for your business. You want to jump right in and get everyone at your organization flexing like Arnie at a Mr. Olympia contest.
STOP!
First, we have to talk about what not to do.
Because humans are humans and we’re complicated beasts, and because many of us are scared of change and have biases and assumptions about other people, there are right ways and wrong ways to implement flexibility.
Issues often arise if managers or employees haven’t worked out how to set ground rules and communicate them, if they don’t have appropriate mindsets and attitudes about work, if there aren’t technology solutions to enable easy communication and collaboration, and if there isn’t an organizational focus on improvement and solving problems as they arise.
So, let’s talk about why I have such a big issue with flexible work policies that don’t have an overall strategy. Then I’ll present a fun example of the wrong way to implement a flexibility program, which will illustrate why it’s important to use rigor and, ironically, structure when putting it together.
Flexibility Policies Are Not Enough
In Chapter 2, I introduced the Flex Scale to show you how to measure the level of flexibility in your organization. If you remember, Policy (Level 1) was one level up from Rigid (Level 0). It was the first, nervous step toward flexibility, and it falls well below what businesses should be aspiring to.
Having a policy is helpful for outlining rules and processes for what flexibility looks like in the business, and who sorts out issues, and other things that are handy to have in an official document. But with nothing but a flexible work policy, flexibility usually remains the exception while rigidity maintains its place as normal.
And woe betide anyone brave enough to put their hand up for flexibility in a rigid world. Regardless of what’s written in the official document, these people encounter judgment, jealousy, stigma, guilt, and pressure to over-perform and overwork, they’re passed over for promotions, and they’re often asked to find work elsewhere, either through convenient redundancies or overt pressure from management or colleagues. They’re the annoying accommodation. The uncommitted slacker. The potential lawsuit. They’re tolerated, like the drunk uncle at Christmas, until you can finally put them in a taxi to go home.
When a company grants a flexible work “arrangement” (honestly, I hate this word – it screams “temporary accommodation,” like looking after your neighbor’s cat while they go on a holiday to Fiji), it’s often only for working moms. They were the people who fought the hardest for flexible work, and eventually they got it. But when they’re the only people with access to flexibility, when a company merely has a policy, it comes with all the burdens outlined above.
Maja Paleka, a flexible-work strategist and consultant, calls this use of policy tick-the-box branding, which often accompanies proud statements from senior executives – “We have lots of moms, and even some dads, working flexibly so they can look after their kids.” Maja summarized this effect on those working moms:
[They] are working flexibly – either part time or leaving early – and are extremely grateful for the opportunity, but oh my goodness do they feel guilty. They know they have no choice – they have to use the opportunity, but they can feel the looks as they leave early to do pick up, and so they have learned how to silently slink out the office so no one notices, or their leaving loudly is: “I have to go do pick up, but I will be online from 7 again!” They feel like they are working full time and then some to try to manage the perception that they are not pulling their weight, and they feel like no one notices this. But they still go back to feeling lucky.1
The other people who suffer with this sort of flexibility work policy are … everyone else.
An increasing number of dads are demanding to be actively involved with their children. Three-quarters of fathers in Australia wish they had additional leave for this reason,2 and a survey in the United Kingdom found that almost 60 percent of fathers wanted their employers to provide more flexibility.3
Yet almost half of workers who request a change to their work structure are denied, and 27 percent of men in the Australian study who did access flexibility experienced discrimination, enough to scare other people away from asking.
Then there are the many other reasons for requiring flexibility, the biggest being the opportunity to be fully human. (This, however, is a far more philosophical discussion to have in a manager’s office than talking about coming in late so you can drop kids at school….)
Policies, by themselves, are really only beneficial to the guilt-ridden moms.
There are several reasons why policies that don’t have an accompanying structured program or strategy for everyone can often cause more problems than they solve.
1. Nothing changes. Systems, technology, mindsets about work, and understanding of productivity and flexibility are all left relatively untouched. The few workers who try to work flexibly in a rigid workplace (and their managers, who are still managing a rigid workplace) are going to find the process challenging and annoying.
2. Humans feel inequality. If someone gets what others want, such as flexibility, those others feel envious, and that comes out in unpleasant ways – comments about slacking off and missing out on promotions being just a couple of them.
The people who are working flexibly while others aren’t also feel that inequality. They feel guilty for getting something that others have been denied, they feel undeserving and embarrassed, and then they overwork to make up for that feeling.
3. There’s no guarantee that anyone will be allowed to work flexibly.
It’s still in the hands of each individual manager to approve or reject flexible work requests, and how they use that power depends on their ability, creativity, perception, and even their mood on the day.
Recent legislation changes, however, in Australia and the United Kingdom, make it more difficult for employers to reject flexible work requests without good business cause. This challenges the subjectivity of the decision, but flexibility shouldn’t be a fight between managers and workers (us versus them); it should be everyone working as a team, on the same side, trying to get work to work for everyone.
4. The responsibility to ask for flexibility still lies with the employee, which can be terrifying. When few others are working flexibly, the practice feels like the exception and not the rule.
Anyone who walks gingerly into the boss’s office to have the conversation about changing their work hours, days, or location will fear how they’re perceived by their boss and their coworkers, and they’ll worry that they’re jeopardizing their career by just mentioning flexible work.
5. The business and individuals without access to flexibility miss out on most of its benefits. If only a few people are gaining these benefits, flexibility won’t significantly benefit the business, and it certainly won’t benefit the other workers.
6. Flexibility needs to be earned. With a policy rather than a strategy in place, people must work for the company for a while before they’re allowed to request a flexible work arrangement.
Rigid workplaces have the mindset that flexibility is a privilege, and that privilege can be accessed only after an employee puts in hard work and rigid hours as a rite of passage, after which they can be trusted to work flexibly. (Because new employees aren’t given keys and passwords to the office and access to company systems and the carpark and the names of the best cafés in the area from their first day, right? Right?)
What this does, practically speaking, is lock people out of employment who need flexibility from day one, such as a single father who needs a job but can’t afford full-time childcare, or someone with a cognitive disability who can work only a few hours a day before they need to rest, or someone with a physical disability who may struggle to get to the office every day, or someone who lives far away from the office and can’t afford to move closer. Having to earn the privilege of flexibility is a form of discrimination that denies them and society of the advantages of their employment.
And businesses miss out on people who are skilled, educated, and motivated but need flexibility before they can take a job, not after a probation period. Huge, untapped talent pools are waiting!
Accommodating a lucky few isn’t good flexibility. It will always be a special case and work-around that you have to deal with, and it won’t be good for anyone.
But launching a proper flexibility program will make it normal. Solutions will be developed that will create productivity improvements you didn’t know were possible. Developing a flexibility program for all, with purpose and strategy, is the way to go!
Implementing Flexibility Piecemeal Is Also Not Enough
At the risk of having you shout, “what the hell do you want from me?” I have to say that having a flexibility program for all is also not good enough if it’s not done properly.
One of my favorite examples of a failed flexibility program was implemented (and subsequently trashed) by Richard Laermer at his New York firm RLM Public Relations. This program so perfectly embodies the wrong mindset about work flexibility that I’m envious that I couldn’t create a fictional example as good if I tried.
In an article describing the project, Laermer writes:
I began offering telecommuting as a perk a little over a year ago when I told everyone they could “phone it in” every Friday. I had hoped home commuting would increase productivity and accommodate a more diverse work force – arguments often used to justify the policy. But instead, my company’s experiment ended up convincing me that telecommuting hurt my employees (and my business) more than it helped.4
Every Friday, staff (not managers, or Laermer) were allowed to work from home. That’s it. This far into the book, I’d be disappointed if you haven’t already guessed how this turned out for everyone.
Yes, employees treated their Phone-it-in-Friday as a day off.
Some were hard to contact, and they rolled their eyes if they were asked to come in on Fridays. One even said she couldn’t meet with a client because she’d arranged a day at the Hamptons.
Laermer felt demotivated when there were fewer people in the office (on that one day of the week), so he assumed motivation, hence productivity, was low for everyone. He didn’t provide data to support this claim.
And then came the killer blow: the CFO felt sad that their “beautiful office” was being wasted when it was nearly empty on Fridays. Thus, the program was ended, leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths and an angry article publicly denouncing flexibility, specifically remote work.
Let’s list some of the ways this was doomed before it began.
1. From a needs-perspective, is it so unbelievable that people treated the day (FRI-DAY!) like a day off? After four days of rigidity – of commuting, being in an open-plan (albeit “beautiful”) office with Laermer breathing down their necks, distractions, noise and bustle – one can imagine what the energy buckets of these employees looked like by the time Friday rolled around: Sahara-dry.
With the sudden liberty afforded by not being under direct supervision for a day, of course the employees took the opportunity to fill their leisure, affection, freedom, and whichever other compartments in their buckets that were drained. Anyone would!
I’ve been seeing this practice of one day of working from home being used more and more by businesses that claim to offer flexibility for their employees. It’s not a good trend. It’s another example of ticking the box – look how flexible we are!
But, from a practical point of view, this practice doesn’t give people the opportunity to learn how to optimize working from home or other locations. It remains an infrequent perk, or gift, which I’ll expand on in the next two points. Having one day of flexibility per week keeps the practice non-normal, the annoying exception to the rigid norm.
2. This perk was provided only to staff, not to managers or executives, which created an us-versus-them situation. Managers couldn’t lead by example, and they didn’t know what it was like for the employees to have Fridays away from the office. And they were likely jealous that they were left out.
The managers were the police of the program rather than active collaborators. They weren’t working with employees to find the best ways to make flexibility successful at the company, so any problems that arose remained problems. Those problems became excuses to end the practice as soon as possible.
3. There was clearly no strategy to this madness. Laermer himself called the remote day a perk, a reward, a gift. He didn’t consider it to be a serious business strategy.
If he had taken the idea seriously, staff would have been consulted on what sort of flexibility they needed (rather than just taking what they were given), and executives would have been on board instead of complaining about something as trivial as the lack of bodies in a building. There would have been supporting systems, ground rules, technology, data, and training (and other things detailed in the next couple of chapters) to ensure that people could be effective at their work regardless of where and when they did it.
Flexibility can’t be an accommodation for the few who need it, nor can it be a perk or a reward, nor should it need to be earned.
Flexibility needs to be available to everyone, including managers (who, after all, are human too), and it needs to be a serious business strategy, fully supported throughout the organization.
You can’t do it half-heartedly. You can’t be sort of in. You have to be all in. Only then can you realize the beautiful benefits of flexibility, for people, for the world around us, and for business productivity. If you’re not all in, you’re going to miss out.