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'Flexible' Working Can Keep You Stressed Out For Longer, Lead to Illness (theguardian.com)
schwit1 sends news about the effects of flexible working schedules on the people who try them. Research has found that many employees fall into a "grazing" pattern for work — constantly being interrupted while working, and continuing to keep up with work emails when not — which results in having elevated stress levels for a longer period of time. This can make such workers more susceptible to illness, and it shows distinct biological consequences to having a poor work-life balance.
Flexible working policies can also raise the risk of poor working conditions, and create resentment among colleagues ... The findings are a blow to advocates of more sophisticated measures for enabling people to achieve a work-life balance in rich economies that tend to overwork some people while underutilising millions of others. With an estimated 10m working days lost to work-related stress in the UK last year, finding a good balance between the demands of home and the job now dominates concerns about the impact of work on health.
Then why are you still working? If being out of work is so great with everything being paid for you, what kind of masochist are you that you're still trying to keep a job?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It usually means "I want to be lazy, not do any planning, not do my job and you'll be at my beck and call to iron out my blunders".
And yes, that's going to stress you into a burn-out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I work flexible hours, and I'm the happiest and most stress-free I've ever been. Didn't realize it until lately when I started experiencing stress again in my personal life. What a change! Don't let work dictate when your working hours are if you can help it. And especially don't *be* flexible about when work can schedule your hours if you can't set your own. The not-knowing of next week's schedule is what will cause your a constant tremor of worry, but being able to say "Oh, something came up, boss, I'll finish Wednesday's hours on Saturday" is like removing the weight of the world.
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It's the same with being on-call in an IT-support gig. Some people are happy to carry a pager and responded to it now and then, others for some reason that I don't understand get really stressed by it and feel on edge the whole time the pager is on their belt.
When it's in addition to your normal workday hours, and you have a week where you don't know what you're doing at night or over the weekend because you can't really make plans or go out to dinner or have too many beers, because some system might go down or need a restart or whatever, so you need to be home to VPN in, or lug around a work laptop w/ a cellular connection, that can work on the nerves. Especially so in a rotating schedule where some of the systems we may have to troubleshoot aren't really our own (our group is broken into logical specialties but the on-call thing is general). Worse, in my group's case anyway, we're expected to actively check our cellphone email (not a pager) regularly during that time, so we have to constantly be edgy.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
It's understood that there are going to be differences between what management wants and what the employee wants, and at some shifting point in the middle everyone is at least not miserable.
And money quite honestly is the bare minimum that a job can offer. A co-worker was given two months off so he could fulfill his dream of back-packing through Europe. That type of consideration builds gratitude that will see a business through a rough patch. Most people tend to reciprocate in kind. That aspect of flexibility on the part of the employer is sorely lacking in most labor arrangements.
And for employees that may not be able (or willing) to offer more in times of FUBAR, competent management is able to take this into account and either fire (kidding) those people or at a minimum take pains to reduce the stress load.
The real problems are when management pays lip service to work-life balance, and there is no accommodation coming from their end. That shit won't fly for long.
You make a very good point. My current job vs my last job is a perfect comparison that makes your point (or a good complementary one). I was unemployed when I got my last job, so I took a wage below what I believed (and still believe) to be my value to the company because I did not have the resume to prove I could do what I said I could do. I worked my ass off to prove I was as good as I claimed expecting that I would get a commensurate raise. I discovered that the owners of that company had a philosophy of paying the least they could get away with (which came back to bite them later when they lost customers as a result and could no longer afford even my discounted rate).
I was once again unemployed when I got my current job. Once again I took below my value to the company to get the job. Once again I busted my ass to prove my ability. This company saw my value and gave me that raise. Not only that, they saw that I could be more valuable to the company in the future and based that raise on where they expected me to be in six months, not where I was at the time of the raise. I will continue to bust my ass for this company, while the last six months at my last company (after I realized that they were not going to pay me for the effort) I spent doing what they paid me for and no more.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I think the problem is that you care too much about the risk of interruption.
I think the problem is that you don't understand that some people's brains are not wired in such a way that they can shut that sort of thing off.
These are the same people who make sure your product actually *works*, instead of just building a prototype or saying "Oh well; we'll fix it in the next release". People who are detail oriented can't simply shut that crap off.