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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.
I had a flexi-remote working job for two years and it was the best gig I ever had. Yes I'd reply to emails at all hours of the day, but I also worked an average 6 hours a day and found it easy to maintain a life/work balance. I ended up moving to Barcelona for six months and had my dream life for a while traveling around the world and working from wherever I happened to be that day.
If you have a job that you enjoy, a good boss and co-workers then it's great. But you have to be someone who can copy with blurred lines in your life and the idea that working/non-working isn't a binary distinction.
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.
And being told to "flex" your hours which means work overtime today (unpaid because you are salaried) and just work fewer hours tomorrow.
Oops. Not tomorrow. Here's another important thing that requires overtime. You can take 2x time off the day after.
Rinse and repeat.
I've had too many managers who think that making everything a "crisis" is an effective means of management.
The conclusions made on the article are fundamentally flawed from an English perspective, because looking at a Dutch company.
Historically harsh Calvinistic work ethics prescribe a strict work-life separation and that's one of the more blatant causes of stress, anxiety, irritation and frustration in a Dutch-only workspace. Rather than flexibility, isolation and alienation at work, so common in such environments, are the problem. People stress themselves due to lack of normal social interaction even when sitting at the office, that makes them also lose interest and systematically refuse any enthusiasm for whatever they do. Some call the lack of social interaction as "being professional", some others call it just plainly "inhuman".
In such workspaces, very differently than in a British, American or Spanish workspace, colleagues hardly ever socialize. They never or very rarely share interests or speak about anything else than the bad weather. They never, ever get to know each other on a personal level, neither they take initiative on their own to share drinks at the pub after a long working day, unless forced to do so or offered free beer. Socializing, in the good or bad, is an essential feature of English workplaces that a dutchman often sees as an annoying nuisance, preferring to go out in the evening with friends from their own community (or "pillar" as segregated communities where called in the past), but mostly never during the work week.
So going to office is boring and alienaing; the moment people keeps working and answering mails also from home, after the 9am-5pm working day, that alienation spreads into private life, breaks the balance and the removal mechanisms, causes stress. This in the Dutch society.
The English, and much more so the American work ethics, traditionally mix private and working life. Logically, since you have to spend 40 hours a week with the same people for the same scope, you accept to make that part of your life and you do not try to work mechanically until it's finished and then forget about the badness of it by seeing entirely different people. In a large American IT company you are on a mission together with your colleagues to make something happen. You know each other, sometimes even each other's families, and you gladly help each other A dutchman would see such strong commitment offending ("as if we can't help ourselves!"). The American way can be very stressful in terms of hard challenges, tiredness and (lack of) rest, but the kick of it, the "mission" in it may make it bearable, even when you have to connect your VPN at 2AM to help out a colleague or keep things running.
Flexibility, as opposed to bigot limitations (can you imagine? forbidding Whatsapp at the office?) in a human and especially in a social work environment is a Good Thing(TM), that may fill and shape a life. Stress can be controlled by sharing with others and knowing and respecting each own's limits. And if one knows and respects its limits, and his employer incidentally does that too, a private life can be built all around the working life, like an onion. Both working life and private life are life.