As organizations tentatively plan how to get work done amid the uncertainty of the coronavirus, both leaders and employees are touting the benefits of flexibility. But what does flexibility at work look like in practice? And how can you know whether your team or organization is using it successfully?

We are researchers who study how organizations of all types — from professional services and IT firms to hospitals, retail stores, and manufacturing facilities — manage flexibility. Over the course of our work we have asked leaders to tell us how they do so (or not). Here is a range of typical responses:

I accommodate employee needs for time to go to the gym during lunch or take a class by allowing a special arrangement with respect to the work schedule.

If a family member is ill or someone has been in a car accident, it’s no issue to leave work.

Because of the way that the units are staffed and scheduled, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of flexibility.

I often resorted to mandatory Zoom meetings on Friday nights at 6 PM, because that was the only calendar opening for key staff members.

We can’t get enough staff on the weekends to run the production we need to run — even with eight different schedule options. That’s not a good thing. I don’t want that to be the reason we can’t produce.

These responses may sound familiar. The variation among them is notable. The first focuses on special arrangements for nonwork activities. The second is contingent on dire circumstances. The third expresses frustration about the barriers to flexibility. The fourth is flexibility at its worst. The last shows that flexible scheduling is a critical (yet unsolved) competitive issue for many organizations.

This variation reflects the fact that the word “flexibility” is vague; its implementation can differ from organization to organization, department to department, and even within teams. It’s no wonder that managers struggle with how to let employees work when and where they do so best. Even companies that were early leaders in piloting extensive flexible working — such as IBM and Bank of America — began pulling back on those arrangements several years ago, because they felt their businesses weren’t benefiting.

Yet coming out of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have announced that they plan to “embrace flexibility,” particularly in a hybrid working model. This is for three key reasons: First, businesses believe that the 24/7 remote-work form of flexibility can be leveraged to support productivity. Second, employees — especially Millennials — are threatening to quit unless they’re granted flexibility. Third, some leaders assume that when employees are permitted to work flexibly, they automatically experience more harmony in their work-life balance.

But these rationales oversimplify the challenge in making flexibility core to an organization’s strategy and operations. As a result, most companies approach the task superficially. In reality, expanding flexible work arrangements entails more than sharing online tool kits, surveying workers’ preferences, purchasing self-scheduling software, or hiring consultants to become more “phygital” (physical plus digital). Despite all the hype about flexibility’s work-life benefits, studies consistently show that companies are better at creating flexible work options than at enabling the use of them. Leaders leave that to the benefits department or payroll consultants.

Employers also have strong biases regarding the types of flexibility. Research shows that if leaders believe that employees are telecommuting to increase productivity, such as by working long hours to meet job demands, then career benefits are likely to ensue. Those benefits are far less prevalent when individuals use flexibility for family or personal reasons. Evidence indicates that when women use flexibility more than men do, they face lower pay, stalled careers, and backlash.

Our worry is that these patterns will recur as organizations plow ahead with flexibility on a much larger scale. But there is a better way. In this article we provide insights on why traditional flexible working practices have not lived up to their potential. We also offer a path forward with what we call true flexibility — a strategy that aligns the interests of employers and employees and thus benefits both groups.

Traditional Approaches

Leaders have typically managed flexibility in one of two ways: as an accommodation around individual work-life events such as illness or childcare, which companies use to attract and retain employees; or as boundaryless working, which many leaders used to transition their organizations to widespread remote work during Covid-19. In the second case, employees are expected, explicitly or implicitly, to be available 24/7 to perform their jobs. Whereas accommodation largely offers flexibility for the individual, boundaryless working offers flexibility for the company. Neither is inherently bad, but both can have unintended consequences, particularly when used in isolation.

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