The dark side of flexibility
Flexibility is the holy grail for working parents these days. Flextime, telecommuting, conference calls, checking email from home, all of these are eagerly sought after as ways to make it a little more possible to combine a satisfying family life with a full career. But flexibility has some downsides, as well as some limitations, that aren’t often considered.
1. Flexibility doesn’t really add more hours to the day. It can save you the commute and the need to dress up, but it doesn’t magically make the time bind go away. I know someone who after the birth of her first child successfully negotiated to convert her job into a part-time, work-from-home position, with flexible hours. She didn’t have paid childcare, however, planning on working while her baby napped, or after her husband came home from work. After several months, she reluctantly resigned, having discovered that she was working every night from 10 pm to 2 am.
2. Flexibility makes it hard to set limits. Cell phones, blackberries, email at home — while these may free you from the office, they make you more a prisoner of work. We all know the people who check their messages constantly, even while on vacation.
3. Flexibility reduces your negotiating position. Until I read Kidding Ourselves, it had never occurred to me to think about the effects of workplace flexibility on household choices. Mahony points out that when a couple negotiates over child care and housework, having the less flexible job can be an advantage. Moreover, she argues that, unless there are significant social changes, increased flexibility will only reinforce the current gendered division of labor, because predominantly women will take advantage of it.
4. Flexibility forces you to make a constant stream of small decisions. If you know that there’s no way you can take off from work on a weekday morning to pass out muffins at your child’s preschool, there’s no decision that needs to be made. If you have a flexible job, you find yourself constantly weighing the alternatives: maybe you could go in two hours early the day before, but then you won’t be able to help get the kids ready for school, and is this more important than your older child’s field trip, and what about the dentist appointment next week, and how likely is it that your boss will reschedule the meeting that was cancelled last week for that morning? If you consciously or subconsciously believe that a "good mother" would always be there to hand out muffins, you wind up feeling like you’re letting your child down each time you could possibly have rearranged your schedule to be there, and didn’t.
September 29th, 2004 at 1:05 pm
Elizabeth, my department is very accepting of flextime — something it hasn’t advertised around the university — but it seems to be a more stable flex than what you’re describing. We have a lot of people on reduced hours and shifted schedules, and we’re currently looking at using flex to stretch lunch long enough to let people go get a good workout in (with the promise to be available til 5:30 or 6), but it’s hard for me to think of anyone with seriously irregular hours. My own 50% schedule adjusts so that my husband can work at our playgroup coop Weds. mornings and I can get that time with my daughter.
Part of that may be the AFSCME influence, and part may be the more temperate academic/midwestern definition of work. Part may also be the fact that academic work has always been flexible — nobody cares when you get the papers graded and the journal article written so long as it happens by some approximate date. Sometimes the deadlines are firm — final grades, external grant proposals — but it’s not an everyday thing.
At upper administrative levels I’m sure the problems you describe are fully felt; it’s unwritten around here that if you move above a certain level, you’re expected to have no other life. So maybe what it comes down to is that whether or not flextime works depends on the kind of work you do, & the expectations bosses and clients are permitted to have of you in that job. That’s a hell of a way to put it, but a nonstop work life for top professionals is expected only because it’s customary & there’s not much those people can or will do about it.
I sense a doctors’ union speech coming on, so will stop.
January 5th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
Elizabeth- This flexibility essay is one of my favorites too- the essay’s points keep lurking in my mind. It makes an important often overlooked point about the downsides of flexiblity that are part of my day-to-day decisions. I do have flexibility at my job, which I cherish, but it does mean the job work must be done eventually, and often not at convenient times so you pay a big price later. Thanks for shining a bright light, Maureen