Why Your Team Isn't Using Your Flexible Work Options

These two things shouldn’t happen at the same time. 

1. Your team has policies for flexible working, paid time off, sabbaticals and part-time work

2. Your team has spent significant parts of the past year burned out, overworked, and in need of a break. 

And yet it happens all the time.

A study from the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations found that employees in demanding roles still fail to take advantage of paid time-off and other options for flexible working even when it would improve their work-life balance.  

In a year when team burnout is at the forefront of everyone’s minds, we thought we’d highlight what they found. 

The authors interviewed 50 management consultants about their careers and personal lives and the challenges of balancing the two.  Whilst the findings are particularly relevant to consultants, they also seem analogous to other intensive knowledge work.  

The authors identified three reasons why this group of consultants failed to take advantage of flexible work programs, even though it would help alleviate stresses in their personal lives:

• They believe it’s incompatible with their work: the interviewees had come to believe that the fundamental nature of their industry was incompatible with flexibility and had stopped expecting or asking for it.

• They believe it’s a personal problem to solve: the interviewees saw work-life balance as a problem to be fixed personally, rather than seeking organisational solutions.  This may sound familiar to anyone still searching for the perfect productivity app whilst failing to take their time off or reduce their workload. 

• They justify it as a choice: linked to the two factors above, interviewees reconciled the dominance of their work lives over their personal lives by convincing themselves that it was a choice they had control over, and that they could leave at any time (despite in practice doing very little to improve their situation).  

In a Harvard Business Review article, the paper’s authors identified three potential ways to change team dynamics so high-performers were encouraged to take advantage of these options:

• Broaden success metrics: for consultants selling their time, billable hours have historically been the overwhelming metric of success.  Equating time at work with high performance incentivizes overwork.  Breaking that link, or at least introducing other metrics of success, can help improve this. 

• Change the culture of overwork: many organisations with these issues glorify overwork and ‘paint long hours and face time as essential, even moral, components of elite professions.’  The authors point to a 2014 study which shows how these norms can be changed to ones which value quality of output rather than quantity of hours.

• Frame flexibility as an organisational value: the dynamics which have most impact on work/life balance are structural ones (see our piece on ‘No I in Burnout’).  It follows that the solutions are organisational rather than personal.  Creating greater flexibility for our teams should be something we strive for collectively, rather than leaving individuals to feel like it’s their personal responsibility (and googling more productivity apps). 

If you find your team also aren’t fully considering these options, maybe the answer lies in some of the above.