The Society for Human Resource Management found that the best companies are embracing flexibility. For many job functions there are no longer any good reasons to require people to come into the office every day, or for work to be done between the hours of 9am and 5pm. More companies will continue to embrace this reality.
Employees today more than ever are looking for meaningful work over a larger paycheck. The best companies not only provide that meaningful work, but also let employees work on their own terms. Employers are increasingly embracing the idea that work can happen anywhere and at any time for many job functions. Workers who are given this freedom are usually happy to check email on their phones while in line at the grocery store or to put in a couple of hours on the laptop before bed. If they care about the work they’re doing it’s not seen as an intrusion. Companies that do not heed this trend will have problems with retention as high-value employees migrate to other organisations that offer meaningful work and flexibility.
In a Good Life Project interview between Mitch Joel and Jonathan Fields, Fields states:
“Work-life balance comes from a baseline assumption that work is outside of life. It doesn’t feed it, it doesn’t intersect. It’s something that you need to stop doing because it’s something that exists purely so you can feed life.”
Two researchers from the nonprofit organization Catalyst, Jeffrey Greenhaus and Gary Powell, support the work-life blend approach. According to the article “Working Life ‘Balance’ Isn’t the Point” in the Harvard Business Review, Greenhaus and Powell believe:
“Work and personal life should be allies and that participation in multiple roles, such as parent, partner, friend, employee, can actually enhance physical and psychological well-being — especially when all of the roles are high quality and managed together.”
Fields also makes another excellent point:
“When everybody’s asleep, one person may make the choice to go and watch TV or read a book. But my choice would be I want to go write. I want to go build something. I want to go produce something. Why is that any lesser of a choice, simply because it’s labeled under ‘work’?”
