Flexibility is the solution to the diversity problem; but all it really means is a new set of expectations around when people are available.
I have some medical issues that mean I often have to visit specialists on a work day; but rather than me have to get approval, block off my calendar, etc. my employer is flexible enough that "I'm busy that morning" is good enough. There's no expectation I be available all day, every day; just that I communicate the times I am available and show flexibility with others schedules as well.
I found in less flexible environments, I was forced to reveal more about my personal problems than I want to let on to people at work. Don't get me wrong; I have friends and mentors who I do confide in about those things, but it isn't necessarily something I want to be common knowledge.
There's no need to justify why you are busy, nor is it considered inappropriate to attend to personal matters during work hours. That's for you to decide. Need to take a 2 hour break in the middle of the day to go to the dog park? Cool. Kid's doctor appointment? Also cool. Ramadan prayer service? Don't care what it is, just communicate your schedule and be flexible with others :)
Anyway; many projects are global these days. Which means you'll have early meetings, late meetings, and some time in between you can split between personal and work. It really does work better IMO.
This is how I've done it all my working life. To be honest, I've assumed this is common to all software development jobs, but now I realize it may be I've just had very flexible employers.
Another kind of flexibility is worth a lot, too, namely flexible working hours.
Examples:
My boss at a previous company used to come in at six a.m., then leave again for family breakfast. After breakfast he drove his kid to kindergarten (by bike), came back, and left again at noon, to have lunch with his family. Came back to work and worked quite long to make up for those long breaks, but there were zero problems for anyone in the company. Everyone knew when he was present and when he wasn't. He was predictable in his flexibility.
A co-worker at the same company used to come in around noon. He always said that the company can have his evenings, but the mornings are his.
Those are extreme examples, but I also find work time flexibility extremely helpful, e.g. with doctor's appointment. "Sure, I can come in at ten". Also everything with the city bureaucracy.
I'm not sure this meets the definition of flexibility by most people. In the casual sense at least. I imagine most people think of flexibility at work to mean they can come in late when they need, take a long break for errands, finish early etc. I think the key difference is that the latter type of flexibility tends to be largely unplanned, and at best communicated at the last minute, or even not at all ("sorry, I woke up late...").
I can certainly see the advantages of the latter form of flexibility to each individual, and the freedom it provides. but for a company or a team that needs to work together and rely on each other, this unplanned flexibility can cause lots of problems... whereas your boss's flexibility is complete easy to work with.
While there's no free lunch, I disagree that it creates lots of problems, and in fact it provides more benefits beyond that freedom (and the respective good will).
By removing the predictability of each other's presence, everyone is shaken off their complacency and is compelled to actually coordinate their shared activities, like meetings. This, in turn, is very useful for employees who require long stretches of uninterrupted time to be the most productive, since it allows them to better plan their days. If you're in the office and you refuse to join an impromptu meeting, and which might threaten a deadline, you look bad. But if you're not physically present, and that's common and accepted, then it's the meeting organizer that looks bad.
I worked in an office where there was not only such flexibility (people arrived late, picked up kids early, etc), but also some colleges had a lot of offsite meetings with clients, and it was fine. We just talked to each other (offline or online) in advance to set things up. No problems.
Just to give some context first: I work in a small remote-first company, and some people are in different time zones (or even travel between time zones).
I totally agree that this can overcome if you "just talk to each other" (or in the remote/online sense, update your calendar or post a message on slack).
The problem however I see is when communication is broken, which happens too often in my experience. The "Sorry, I woke up late", or "Sorry, I forgot to update the calendar" after-the-fact communication irks me personally and hurts collaboration. Perhaps I'm wrong, but my perception is that a lot of people associate flexibility with lack of accountability ("I'm flexible, I'll just take a break right now, and I don't need to tell anyone, because, well, we're all flexible").
To summarise, I would say that clearly-communicated flexibility works great. But it's an essential prerequisite for it working.
This sounds like you still expect colleagues to be available for immediate, unscheduled interruption unless otherwise noted. I think the idea is to reverse that.
We should be accountable to getting the work done, not to being available for unscheduled communication.
closeparan is exactly right. If you're saying you can't work because the other person is on an unannounced break, that means you'd be interrupting their work otherwise.
Coordination means finding a time appropriate for both, not having to pre-announce one's availability so that others can barge in whenever they feel like.
> ...everyone is shaken off their complacency and is compelled to actually coordinate their shared activities...
Some of this is trivial to delegate to a combination of tools (official calendaring tools) and people (admins). It's strange, really, that we don't expect technical contributors to delegate non-technical things more often.
I imagine I get ribbed about my butt in seat time and how it appears tardy, but I hope that my logged hours and work produced shows I work what is expected and then am happy to buckle down for a long day when required.
If I have worked "Overtime" it is balanced out when the project is finished, and that is communicated to my PMs and comforms to the natural ebb and flow of company workload. I think it works well for everyone.
I will argue that anyone that a manager that automatically looks at work produced (or slightly worse, logged hours) is not one to worry about. One that worries about butt in seat time will be difficult to convince with the other two.
Exactly. I'd argue that "flexibility" is a keyword bad managers tend to use a lot. I noticed many of them insist on "you will need to be flexible" (and seem to repeat that a lot) and what it really means is that by default you drew the short straw, and you can expect to get screwed over.
This varies hugely by employer. We have two coworkers off for long vacations right now, during a semi-crunch. My boss and another coworker took Monday off to see the eclipse. Nobody's judging anyone, and my boss leads by example.
I'm really against the "unlimited vacations" policy, I much prefer the European style compulsory vacation. Yes, I really think employees should be forced to take time off if need be.
> As long as we get the right framework and people are not being exploited, I think flexible work is a great thing
That's the crux of it there, isn't it? I don't suspect that the newer generation prefers their lot to the stability and long-term viability of their forebears, for the most part, but rather that structural changes have sort of foisted these circumstances on them. It'd take some additional evidence to support the notion that people have shifted their preferences, rather than there just being a dwindling of opportunity.
There are a lot of factors to consider, but there is a difference in the type of work the newer generation is doing. I think there is still a lot to learn about how best to enable productive thought work, and we are learning that 8hrs at a desk is probably not the one size fits all key to productivity.
To speak nothing of the normalizing of "permenant overtime", it is simply not sustainable for everyone to have their mind occupied for the majority of every day. It leaves no room or energy for individual endeavors, and I think many are simply waking up to that fact and exploring alternatives.
I'm worried about the impact of this report on self-employed people, as it sounds like it'll be used to increase taxes on them.
One piece of tax relief a self-employed person gets is a reduction of their socialised health care tax: National Insurance. If you're self-employed you pay this tax at 9% rather than the 12% that employed people pay.
The government that commissioned this report tried to remove this particular bit of tax relief earlier this year, but was stopped as people were really annoyed about it.
We have this thing in the UK called 'Zero Hours contracts'. For example, an Uber or Deliveroo driver is on a contract where they can work as many hours as they like. The Uber driver is self-employed, and isn't an employee, so they have to do their own taxes etc.
The government claims that A) Zero-hours contracts are being used to provide less stable contracts for the employers benefit, as a zero-hours contract can be ended without notice (this is definitely true, though I'm not sure how many self-employed people are on zero-hours contracts), and B) that self-employment is overly incentivised in the tax system.
It sounds like this report will be used to raise taxes on all self-employed people because unscrupulous employers are abusing the tax reliefs. But this will have a detrimental effect on all self-employed people (small business owners, actual freelancers, software engineer contractors).
Well what's the justification for the tax break? If it's "well, self-employed people are important so we should just throw money at them" then that's not a very good reason. Why not have them pay 0 taxes?
While I'm personally for single-payer healthcare, I don't see why going off on your own means you should get to pay less in taxes than someone who has to work under a boss. Does it incentivize economic growth? You're not hiring anyone...
That's a good question. Sorry that I didn't answer it in my original comment.
Self-employment comes with personal financial risk, but the reason for their lower national insurance contributions (NIC) is to do with pensions. The UK chancellor this year:
> Historically, the differences in NICs between those in employment and the self-employed reflected differences in state pensions and contributory welfare benefits.
Self-employed people are more unlikely to have a pension, and the state pension is about £7,000 per year.
In contrast to this, people who are employed have access to a workplace pension, where an employer must contribute to the employee's pension. The average teacher will have a workplace pension of £25,000 per year.
So, the idea behind the reduced NIC for self-employed people is that they'll put the money into their savings / personal pension. If you're self-employed and adding 3% of your income into your pension each year, then the 3% savings on NIC would be the government enabling you (as your own employer) to 'match' your own annual pension contribution.
It seems that when this guy says "flexibility at work", he's talking about the gig economy, not being able to come four hours late into work because you need to get some dental work done:
> Meanwhile, freelancing and flexible work is becoming more common. The number of self-employed people, approximately 4.8 million in the UK, is at a record high and around one in five British workers now have so-called “non-standard work arrangements”.
> He will also examine how flexibility can be maintained, while also supporting job security and workplace rights.
> “As long as we get the right framework and people are not being exploited, I think flexible work is a great thing. I also think it’s a great thing if it’s increasingly possible for people to work for themselves. I’m in favour of self-employment, I’m in favour of flexibility at work as long as we make sure it’s not exploitative and that it’s not having detrimental effects on the capacity to raise taxes to pay for services. If you can do the work, make the contribution and be your own boss, for many people that’s a liberation.”
So everyone who's giving examples of their bosses coming in late and staying late, or claiming that flexible work schedules solve diversity issues - neat, but you should be talking about your bosses driving for Uber in the morning, and non-white-males being bike messengers over their lunch hour.
I think flexibility and similar benefits like working from home are not coming from legislation, but should be initiated by the employees... in my case, I work for a big old telco and few years ago told my boss I am not coming to the office anymore and now mos of my team are working exclusively at home even tough the official company policy is for everyone to work from an office... bottom line, if you are good at your job, have the respect of you peers and bosses, deliver on time and are ready to help in case of emergencies, you can change a lot of the "official" rules in your workplace....
I have some medical issues that mean I often have to visit specialists on a work day; but rather than me have to get approval, block off my calendar, etc. my employer is flexible enough that "I'm busy that morning" is good enough. There's no expectation I be available all day, every day; just that I communicate the times I am available and show flexibility with others schedules as well.
I found in less flexible environments, I was forced to reveal more about my personal problems than I want to let on to people at work. Don't get me wrong; I have friends and mentors who I do confide in about those things, but it isn't necessarily something I want to be common knowledge.
There's no need to justify why you are busy, nor is it considered inappropriate to attend to personal matters during work hours. That's for you to decide. Need to take a 2 hour break in the middle of the day to go to the dog park? Cool. Kid's doctor appointment? Also cool. Ramadan prayer service? Don't care what it is, just communicate your schedule and be flexible with others :)
Anyway; many projects are global these days. Which means you'll have early meetings, late meetings, and some time in between you can split between personal and work. It really does work better IMO.