“For many people, flexibility at work can be a liberation.”
sitra.fi
sitra.fi
I have some medical issues that mean I often have to visit specialists on a work day; but rather than me have to get approval, block off my calendar, etc. my employer is flexible enough that "I'm busy that morning" is good enough. There's no expectation I be available all day, every day; just that I communicate the times I am available and show flexibility with others schedules as well.
I found in less flexible environments, I was forced to reveal more about my personal problems than I want to let on to people at work. Don't get me wrong; I have friends and mentors who I do confide in about those things, but it isn't necessarily something I want to be common knowledge.
There's no need to justify why you are busy, nor is it considered inappropriate to attend to personal matters during work hours. That's for you to decide. Need to take a 2 hour break in the middle of the day to go to the dog park? Cool. Kid's doctor appointment? Also cool. Ramadan prayer service? Don't care what it is, just communicate your schedule and be flexible with others :)
Anyway; many projects are global these days. Which means you'll have early meetings, late meetings, and some time in between you can split between personal and work. It really does work better IMO.
Examples:
My boss at a previous company used to come in at six a.m., then leave again for family breakfast. After breakfast he drove his kid to kindergarten (by bike), came back, and left again at noon, to have lunch with his family. Came back to work and worked quite long to make up for those long breaks, but there were zero problems for anyone in the company. Everyone knew when he was present and when he wasn't. He was predictable in his flexibility.
A co-worker at the same company used to come in around noon. He always said that the company can have his evenings, but the mornings are his.
Those are extreme examples, but I also find work time flexibility extremely helpful, e.g. with doctor's appointment. "Sure, I can come in at ten". Also everything with the city bureaucracy.
I can certainly see the advantages of the latter form of flexibility to each individual, and the freedom it provides. but for a company or a team that needs to work together and rely on each other, this unplanned flexibility can cause lots of problems... whereas your boss's flexibility is complete easy to work with.
By removing the predictability of each other's presence, everyone is shaken off their complacency and is compelled to actually coordinate their shared activities, like meetings. This, in turn, is very useful for employees who require long stretches of uninterrupted time to be the most productive, since it allows them to better plan their days. If you're in the office and you refuse to join an impromptu meeting, and which might threaten a deadline, you look bad. But if you're not physically present, and that's common and accepted, then it's the meeting organizer that looks bad.
I worked in an office where there was not only such flexibility (people arrived late, picked up kids early, etc), but also some colleges had a lot of offsite meetings with clients, and it was fine. We just talked to each other (offline or online) in advance to set things up. No problems.
I totally agree that this can overcome if you "just talk to each other" (or in the remote/online sense, update your calendar or post a message on slack).
The problem however I see is when communication is broken, which happens too often in my experience. The "Sorry, I woke up late", or "Sorry, I forgot to update the calendar" after-the-fact communication irks me personally and hurts collaboration. Perhaps I'm wrong, but my perception is that a lot of people associate flexibility with lack of accountability ("I'm flexible, I'll just take a break right now, and I don't need to tell anyone, because, well, we're all flexible").
To summarise, I would say that clearly-communicated flexibility works great. But it's an essential prerequisite for it working.
We should be accountable to getting the work done, not to being available for unscheduled communication.
Coordination means finding a time appropriate for both, not having to pre-announce one's availability so that others can barge in whenever they feel like.
Some of this is trivial to delegate to a combination of tools (official calendaring tools) and people (admins). It's strange, really, that we don't expect technical contributors to delegate non-technical things more often.
Finishing at 11pm? Gotta be flexible to meet the deadline. Leaving before normal time? Be ready to be silently judged
If I have worked "Overtime" it is balanced out when the project is finished, and that is communicated to my PMs and comforms to the natural ebb and flow of company workload. I think it works well for everyone.
That's the crux of it there, isn't it? I don't suspect that the newer generation prefers their lot to the stability and long-term viability of their forebears, for the most part, but rather that structural changes have sort of foisted these circumstances on them. It'd take some additional evidence to support the notion that people have shifted their preferences, rather than there just being a dwindling of opportunity.
To speak nothing of the normalizing of "permenant overtime", it is simply not sustainable for everyone to have their mind occupied for the majority of every day. It leaves no room or energy for individual endeavors, and I think many are simply waking up to that fact and exploring alternatives.
One piece of tax relief a self-employed person gets is a reduction of their socialised health care tax: National Insurance. If you're self-employed you pay this tax at 9% rather than the 12% that employed people pay.
The government that commissioned this report tried to remove this particular bit of tax relief earlier this year, but was stopped as people were really annoyed about it.
We have this thing in the UK called 'Zero Hours contracts'. For example, an Uber or Deliveroo driver is on a contract where they can work as many hours as they like. The Uber driver is self-employed, and isn't an employee, so they have to do their own taxes etc.
The government claims that A) Zero-hours contracts are being used to provide less stable contracts for the employers benefit, as a zero-hours contract can be ended without notice (this is definitely true, though I'm not sure how many self-employed people are on zero-hours contracts), and B) that self-employment is overly incentivised in the tax system.
It sounds like this report will be used to raise taxes on all self-employed people because unscrupulous employers are abusing the tax reliefs. But this will have a detrimental effect on all self-employed people (small business owners, actual freelancers, software engineer contractors).
While I'm personally for single-payer healthcare, I don't see why going off on your own means you should get to pay less in taxes than someone who has to work under a boss. Does it incentivize economic growth? You're not hiring anyone...
Self-employment comes with personal financial risk, but the reason for their lower national insurance contributions (NIC) is to do with pensions. The UK chancellor this year:
> Historically, the differences in NICs between those in employment and the self-employed reflected differences in state pensions and contributory welfare benefits.
Self-employed people are more unlikely to have a pension, and the state pension is about £7,000 per year.
In contrast to this, people who are employed have access to a workplace pension, where an employer must contribute to the employee's pension. The average teacher will have a workplace pension of £25,000 per year.
So, the idea behind the reduced NIC for self-employed people is that they'll put the money into their savings / personal pension. If you're self-employed and adding 3% of your income into your pension each year, then the 3% savings on NIC would be the government enabling you (as your own employer) to 'match' your own annual pension contribution.
> Meanwhile, freelancing and flexible work is becoming more common. The number of self-employed people, approximately 4.8 million in the UK, is at a record high and around one in five British workers now have so-called “non-standard work arrangements”.
> He will also examine how flexibility can be maintained, while also supporting job security and workplace rights.
> “As long as we get the right framework and people are not being exploited, I think flexible work is a great thing. I also think it’s a great thing if it’s increasingly possible for people to work for themselves. I’m in favour of self-employment, I’m in favour of flexibility at work as long as we make sure it’s not exploitative and that it’s not having detrimental effects on the capacity to raise taxes to pay for services. If you can do the work, make the contribution and be your own boss, for many people that’s a liberation.”
So everyone who's giving examples of their bosses coming in late and staying late, or claiming that flexible work schedules solve diversity issues - neat, but you should be talking about your bosses driving for Uber in the morning, and non-white-males being bike messengers over their lunch hour.