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INTRODUCTION

Would you like to work fewer hours? Some companies now allow employees to work flexible hours, such as starting and finishing later, or doing five days' work in four days. In this episode, Pippa and Phil talk about flexible work and whether it benefits employees, with Heejung Chung, professor of work and employment at King's College Business School in London.

TRANSCRIPT

Pippa
Would you like to choose which hours you work?

Heejung Chung
You had to either give up being a good mum or a good parent, or you had to give up your very lucrative career. Now, with flexible working, you could do both. But the question is at what cost?

Phil
Today we're talking about flexible work and whether set working hours are a thing of the past.

Pippa
Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work, the podcast to help improve your business English. In this series, we're looking at the big forces shaping the world of work today and asking how our jobs might change in the future. I'm Pippa.

Phil
And I'm Phil. Find a transcript for this episode at bbclearningenglish.com.

Pippa
So, Phil, I know you've worked both as an employee with the same hours every week, and you've also worked freelance, where I imagine you could choose a bit more when you worked. Which do you prefer?

Phil
Well, if we're talking about working hours, it's definitely better being freelance because you can arrange your work around things you have in your day, so it sometimes means you can get involved in different projects, or you can meet friends, or you can do things, and then you just make sure you get the work done at another time. And so having that complete flexibility, that's definitely better.

Pippa
Hmm. Interesting. But I suppose you always have to worry about where the next job comes from, where your work's coming from, when you're freelance.

Phil
Yes. That's true.

Pippa
Well, in recent years, it's become more common for companies to offer flexible working. So that way you get the flexible hours that you might have when you're freelance, you get to choose more the hours that you work, but you're still an employee, so you can still get some of those benefits. So we're going to be looking a little bit more at this in this programme.

Phil
Yes. Pippa, you've been speaking to Heejung Chung, professor of work and employment at King's College London Business School.

Pippa
Yes. Heejung has written a book, The Flexibility Paradox. Now, a paradox is a situation which seems impossible because it needs two opposite things to be true. And we'll get to how this might impact flexible working later. But I wanted to start by asking what we mean when we talk about flexible working.

Heejung Chung
Flexible work in a very broader sense, is any kind of arrangements that provide workers with any types of flexibility. So we have flexible schedule, so you have flexible starting and ending times of work. So you maybe not start like, you know, you don't work nine to five, but you kind of start at 10 and end at six. Or you might have, you know, early starts and then early ending times. And some people use that in the annual basis where some weeks you work very long hours, so like, you know, 50 hours a week, but then in other cases you get days off or etc. And then there's things such as, you know, condensed hours, so where you work your 40 hours in four days, and then, of course, since the pandemic, the everything that everybody's talking about is remote working, working from home, hybrid working.

Pippa
Are there perceived benefits to introducing these flexible policies into businesses?

Heejung Chung
If you don't have these flexible working arrangements. If you were to say like you have to be in the office nine to five and these, and you know, these are the only ways in which you can work, you are excluding a whole bunch of people who have additional needs and responsibility. The biggest one is people with caring responsibilities. And unfortunately for most countries, those are women. So we've kind of excluded women from the labour market. And what we also see is that that's true for people with disabilities. And I mean, not necessarily like physical disabilities, but any mental health issues or fluctuating long-term illnesses, which actually covers a huge range of people, including older workers. But the other thing is even for people you know who don't have these caring responsibilities or illnesses, it's that work-life balance or having, giving people, you know, enhanced wellbeing through flexible working, work-life balance through flexible working really helps productivity. And I think again and again, happy workers are productive workers, workers who don't have the constant stress of having to balance work with other aspects of their life are going to be the more focussed workers, and I think managers are really waking up to that.

Pippa
We've talked before on the programme about wellbeing and how good wellbeing can help businesses keep their staff for longer and can help workers be more productive.

Phil
Yeah, and it sounds like allowing workers to have flexible hours could be an important way to keep staff happy.

Pippa
Yes, and as Heejung mentioned, it could be a good thing for people who have caring responsibilities, parents who've got to pick their kids up from school and things like that.

Phil
Yes. I wonder, are there any downsides to this flexible working model?

Pippa
Well, this is where the paradox that we mentioned at the start of the programme comes in. So Heejung's research has found that often people who have flexible working arrangements actually work more than people with set hours.

Heejung Chung
So that's actually kind of the core message of my book, The Flexibility Paradox, where I've conducted a lot of research across Europe where we saw that people who have those flexibilities in the boundaries of time and space, or working from home, flexible schedules, are the ones who usually tend to work longer hours, up to two more additional hours a week even, and also are more likely to think about work, work during their free time. So have work kind of blurred over to private life. Especially for women, what we see is that they are using the flexible boundaries of work and time to squeeze in as much work as possible. I mean, both domestic labour and paid labour. So they're essentially using the very equal 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to squeeze in as much paid and unpaid work. Prior to that, you have to give one or the other up. You had to either give up being a good mum or a good parent, or you had to give up your very lucrative career. But now with flexible working, you could do both. But the question is at what cost?

Pippa
Another idea we sometimes hear talked about when it comes to flexible working is the four-day week. Supporters believe it will improve work-life balance and help companies keep employees longer.

Heejung Chung
Based on the experiments of trials that were conducted in the UK, Ireland, Australia and so many other countries. Majority of the companies that have trialled it were quite happy, so they see at least, not a reduction in productivity, so maintained productivity, if not increased efficiencies. They see a huge growth in wellbeing, work-life balance outcomes for workers, which then helps with retention because, you know, happy work-life balance – why would you want to leave the company? And they see other kind of broader outcomes. And we've seen outcomes such as, you know, more gender equality. So men pitching in more with care work. We see a lot of kind of engagement with volunteering work, kind of work with the community. But again, some people think it's a pipe dream. Many think that this is the next step in the future of work.

Phil
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see whether as technology keeps changing, whether it means that companies can start experimenting with people working fewer hours. I guess it's difficult to know what the future holds.

Pippa
Hmm, yeah. And if, as Heejung says, people who work flexibly often end up working more, either for their jobs or doing domestic work, like looking after kids or cleaning the house, whether that might not always lead to better wellbeing, we might not get those benefits that a lot of people want to get from things like the four-day week.

Phil
That's it for this episode of Learning English for Work. Find more programmes to help you with your English at work on our website bbclearningenglish.com.

Pippa
We'll be back next week to talk about generations in the workplace. See you then, bye.

Phil
Bye. 

Now try this...

Want to find a job with flexible hours? Try our series about applying for a job.