When we talk about workstyle – our term for working wherever and whenever you like – it is often confused with flexible working, so there’s an element of the history of work it’s important to consider.

Flexible working has been around for more than 70 years. It was the brainchild of the great industrialist and cereal maker WK Kellogg, who allowed his workers to change their shift patterns to six hours rather than eight hours each. So far, so progressive, but Roosevelt’s dictate during the Second World War that all factories needed to be operating at full capacity brought the initiative to an abrupt end. It was revived in West Germany in the 1960s by German management consultant Christel Kammerer and first implemented by German aerospace firm Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm in 1967, because traffic was so bad around the factory that workers were frequently turning up late, harming productivity. (Kammerer, like us, hated nothing more than sitting in traffic – she probably had children who liked listening to the Frozen soundtrack on repeat too)

Initially called ‘gliding time’ or the German gleitzeit, the idea was for management to agree to a period of time in the morning within which the employees could choose to arrive. Initially, this period was between 7am and 8am in the morning and between 4pm and 6pm at the end of the working day. So, the first foray into flexible working barely allowed an hour either side of the typical working pattern, and things haven’t improved a whole lot since.

The exceptional trailblazer Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley set up an organisation for women working flexibly and exclusively from home in 1962 that grew to 8,500 employees – why her ‘crusade’ didn’t inspire many more organisations to follow suit completely baffles us. Instead of the revolution this should have inspired, evolution prevailed and growing traffic congestion and the oil and gas crisis gradually increased the demand for flexible working and ‘telecommuting’ in the 1970s and 80s. It was only in the 1990s that legislation was passed for flexible work in the USA, and only in 2014 that the UK introduced the universal right to request flexible working (after 26 weeks of continuous employment with the same employer). Even now, this right is just to request flexible working, not for employers to have to grant it. 

When we talk about workstyle people often exclaim “The 9-5 has been dead for a long time!” and “Loads of people I know work flexibly.” And on the surface, that seems like a good thing. Yes, people are working more flexibly, but it is actually slowing down our progress towards a healthier, more productive life and a more inclusive society.

Forgive our negativity here, but we want to lay out clearly the three main reasons flexible working isn’t the answer:

1. It is flexing around an outdated, Industrial Age system
2. It isn’t creating change fast enough, or at all for huge groups in society
3. It is creating dangerous divisions between flexible workers and everyone else

Let’s look at each of these issues in more detail. 

Without question the furthering of flexible working comes from the right motivation, to give people the freedom to adjust their working hours to fit their individual circumstances, but it is only doing so in a very limited way. It is, at best, a soggy sticking plaster on the more fundamental wound that society is still endorsing a trumped up one-size-fits-all system of work. In short, flexible working requires an inflexible system of work in order to exist.

Starting work an hour ‘later’, not working Fridays, or working from home on a Tuesday - flexible working is always characterised by how it varies from the 9-5, five-day-a-week, office based regime that is a nasty hangover from the industrial era. And it is always just that – a variation to the 200-year-old system rather than a radical departure.

Do any of your friends who work flexibly only work during their baby’s nap times? Or just work term-time? Or live in the depths of a Czech forest? It turns out that flexible working doesn’t have quite that level of flexibility. Workstyle does. Flexible working is anchored in the traditional working mindset and can never be the individualised system of work that we believe is necessary now that we are in the globally connected and universally accessible digital age of work. We are often reminded of how different the mindset of a workstyler is from someone who works flexibly when we talk about working three days a week. A workstyler might respond: “That’s great, what do you do with the other four days?”, but even the greatest champions of flexible working usually say: “That’s great, what do you do with the other two days?”

Even with flexibility, whole tranches of society remain excluded from work, and even many of those who are included are unhappy. More on this later. The idea that flexible working is the solution is in fact the biggest risk for the progress we need. What we desperately need now is to make wholesale systemic change to move from something masquerading as individualised, to a new and truly individualised system of work. We have been held back from more revolutionary change by organisations believing ‘tweaking work at the edges’ through flexible working is enough. It ticks the box, shows they are doing something, allows them to maintain the status quo and lets them off the hook of needing to fundamentally change working practices to be more inclusive, and more fit for the time we live in.  

Flexible working is here, and yet there are huge swathes of society who are still excluded from work. Flexible working isn’t working.

The statistics speak for themselves; flexible working has been around for 70 years but the gap for those with autism who want to work and those who do, is actually widening and unemployment for those with mental health problems is worsening too. The majority of retiring workers would prefer to keep working in some capacity but can’t. The list goes on… While the incremental change that flexible working seeks to drive may be helping specific groups, namely working parents (though even this is a more complex debate), it is not solving the problems of many groups who continue to be fundamentally excluded from work for other reasons. This is not just a case of ‘any progress is good’ – we’ve tried that and flexible working hasn’t changed things in any meaningful way for these important groups who together make up a large proportion of our society. In fact, for some excluded groups, it hasn’t created any change at all.

The reality is that flexible working is not equally available for everyone. It depends on your circumstances, the organisation you work for and often whether you can write a ‘business case’ for it. This is not just about policies or supportive legal frameworks, often it’s also ultimately dependent on your line manager: whether they can empathise with your desire to work flexibly, how far they are happy to support you in reshaping your responsibilities to fit with flexible working and whether they have the time and headspace to help you to fit your work around your life. What this means is that flexible working is still the preserve of the few, and particularly parents, or those with very specific requirements meaning they need to work outside of the ‘norm’, but even then they often need to be ‘flexible’ about being flexible.

For those with full-time jobs who have the right to request flexible working, this is not a guarantee it will be agreed to. In fact, so long as they treat all individuals in the same way, which really only means being seen to follow due process, most organisations are within their rights to refuse these requests on various subjective business reasons ranging from the burden of additional costs to a perceived detrimental effect on quality or performance. This explains why just 30% of requests for flexible working were accepted in 2019, while flexi-time was still unavailable to 58% of UK employees, according to the TUC. There are countless more people who don’t even try to get flexible working because the onus is on them to make a case for it and they don’t have the confidence to ask - one survey found this to be true for 43% of women, and we’re confident many men would be lacking in confidence too.

Experimenting with four-day working weeks and shorter working days is seen as progressive but continues to miss the point that we’re all individuals, and so any hours-based working system that is unilaterally imposed doesn’t have room for individual circumstances or individual preference and therefore falls short of the leaps forward we could make. The costs that we are seeing for individuals and society call for much more of a radical shift in how we work.

In a previous job, when Lizzie worked flexibly (three days work in the office, four days as a mum at home), she always felt she missed out on all the most important stuff. The celebration of a new client win, a big announcement, someone debuting a new hairstyle or the draw for the next-royal-baby-name sweepstake. In reality it probably wasn’t all important, but she felt like it was. Even the silly or fun things affected how much she felt part of the team at work. This is in-group, out-group dynamics in action; Lizzie felt like she wasn’t part of the ‘main’ group because she missed out on these moments of cultural inclusion.

Flexible working is saying that the ‘normal’ way to work is a traditional 9-5, five-day week and that those who work ‘flexibly’ by varying that are different or special in some way. In some businesses this is explicitly stated, in others it isn’t, it’s just how it feels. This creates an ‘out-group’ dynamic where the flexible workers are seen as less valuable employees by others and feel less valued themselves. This is important not only for the individuals, but also for businesses too; 93% of employees who feel valued said that they are motivated to do their best at work, whereas of those who don’t feel valued, only 33% would say the same. 

‘Hybrid’ working, a trend that started to emerge following the coronavirus pandemic, where everyone has a ‘blend’ of working and may, for instance, be mandated to be in the office two days a week, is the same. It creates two groups – those that are in the office and those that aren’t. When we say flexible working is our nemesis, hybrid working is that nemesis’s younger sibling. In both flexible and hybrid working there is a dominant group – for the former it’s those who work ‘full time’ and for the latter it’s those who work in the office (nobody wants to be the only one joining a meeting via video call when everyone else is in the room together). But the point isn’t which is the dominant group – it’s having a dominant group at all, which in itself creates tension and can lead to toxic behaviour. What we need is a system that gives individual choice to each person across the whole group – it’s the same for everyone because everyone can choose. It creates the much-needed level playing field and the level of inclusion we ought to be aspiring to.

And so our whistle stop tour dissecting just a few relevant elements of the history of work comes to an end. Though the eight-hour-day was a breakthrough in its time, the industrial system of work and the beliefs that accompany it are a relic of a bygone era which is creating a huge amount of unseen harm.

In the 70 years since its conception, flexible working has only made progress for some excluded groups, and now it is distracting the conversation from the more radical change that is needed. However widespread its adoption, it will never create the leaps forward in working practices that we need. We have a unique opportunity over the next decade to create a true revolution – a fundamental change in how we all work. But if we all keep feeling grateful for working ‘flexibly’ – coming in a bit late, leaving a bit early or not working on a Friday – then we will miss the chance to be part of something far more transformational for us all.

We need to stop trying to evolve the industrial system into something better. It’s time to rip it up completely and start again. 

This is an edited extract from Workstyle: A Revolution For Wellbeing, Productivity And Society by Alex Hirst and Lizzie Penny. 

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