The Radical Promise of Truly Flexible Work

The Radical Promise of Truly Flexible Work

Nearly four years after the Covid-19 pandemic upended the norms of work around the world, most of us are still struggling to find a new normal. Employers are grappling with a host of conflicting demands. On the one hand, they need to boost productivity and contain costs in the face of inflationary trends and slow economic growth, and shareholders are laser-focused on the bottom line. On the other, organizations must solve what Microsoft’s chief people officer, Kathleen Hogan, has called a “human energy crisis.” Many workers are burned out and disengaged, still trying to adjust to remote or hybrid work or stressed by return-to-office requirements. Some are also managing health issues — including long Covid symptoms — and caregiving roles. They’re also coping with drastically increased costs of living. According to one survey, 42% of employees say their employers don’t care about them.

Is it possible for companies to protect employee autonomy, engagement, and well-being, as well as job flexibility, while also ensuring efficiency and productivity through a period of economic uncertainty and slower growth? My research into how organizations unlock the productivity of neurodivergent and disabled workers points to a way forward — one that allows leaders to accommodate the unique needs of every team member. By embracing comprehensive flexibility, organizations support stronger engagement and performance, not just on a case-by-case basis but at scale.

This approach starts with the understanding that true, sustainable flexibility is about more than just work location and hours. It encompasses which tasks people do and how they get them done. It’s about making work “fit” people, not the other way around. When organizations center the design of work on humans, values, and long-term success in this way, they become productive, resilient, inclusive, and equitable.

Flexibility, Frozen

Ironically, while widespread flexibility was vital for knowledge work organizations to not only survive but innovate and financially thrive during the height of the pandemic, many businesses still balk at permanently adopting it. Instead, they’ve resorted to old formulas and one-size-fits-all policies that discount individual variability. One person is slacking off? All must be micromanaged, without regard for differences in self-leadership or the impact on productivity and morale. Some people are energized by in-person work? Those who are drained by it must just fall in line and show up.

These rigid, reactive practices will not build sustainable productivity. Designing flexible, adaptable systems will. Every person’s body and mind are unique, and when businesses force them into conformity, no one does their best.

Consider a historic example. In the middle of the last century, the United States Air Force had a problem with frequent crashes: There were 17 accidents on one day alone. After ruling out pilot error, poor training, and mechanical failure, investigators found that cockpits were the cause. Designed in 1920, they were constricting and uncomfortable for the 1950s pilots.

The redesign project started by measuring more than 4,000 pilots on 10 relevant dimensions — such as torso length, arm and leg length, and neck and chest circumference — and calculating averages for every dimension. But none of the pilots were perfectly average, and so designing the cockpit around those numbers meant designing for no one.

Then the Air Force did something manufacturers had thought impossible: It made everything adjustable — from seats to foot pedals to helmet straps.

These solutions were both cheap and easy to implement, and the results were remarkable. Pilot performance soared. Pilot diversity — and the availability of talent — increased because more body sizes (including female ones) could be accommodated. Of course, adjustable seats ultimately became standard not just in cockpits but in cars.

The relatively quick transition from “impossible” to “standard” sounds a lot like the story of working remotely when lockdowns hit in March 2020. Although the technology has existed since the 1990s, many organizations were as recently as 2019 refusing requests to work from home as a disability accommodation, considering it “unreasonable.” When Covid hit, however, the number of people in the United States working mostly from home spiked: from 5.7% (roughly 9 million people) in 2019 to 17.9% (27.6 million people) in 2021. But companies are still questioning whether they can commit to these — or even greater — levels of flexibility because they haven’t thought deeply enough about how to make elements of work adjustable so that everyone is able to achieve peak performance.

Finding Alignment

Comprehensive flexibility cannot be a temporary fix or a privilege bestowed on a select few. Rather, it must be ingrained in organizational culture, a must for an inclusive and productive workplace. Accomplishing this requires two types of alignment:

• The what: Aligning what people do with their strengths. When people do what they’re best at, they’re more creative and innovative. An analysis of multiple studies indicates that job satisfaction, work engagement, well-being, and work performance are all correlated to working with one’s strengths.
• The how: Aligning how people work (including where and at what hours) with people’s lives, health needs, and energy. Data from around the world indicates that flexible work benefits work–life balance, productivity, and organizational outcomes — a true “win-win.”

In my consulting work, I’ve helped teams and companies adopt this strategy of comprehensive flexibility with positive results. Consider the case of Jenna and Celine (not their real names), two marketers at a growing organization. Jenna was responsible for creating vision and copy, event planning, and attending shows and conferences. She loved the creative part of her job, but the travel requirement was a cause of constant stress and anxiety, and the extra hours it required were starting to take a toll on her health. She considered quitting. Celine was a part-time graphic designer who desperately wanted to do more, socialize, and travel. She felt stuck and unhappy.

These two talented people were not working with their strengths. Fortunately, the fix was not difficult: Celine wanted to do the very work that was leaving Jenna drained. Jenna cut back her hours and handed her public-facing duties to Celine. This gave both employees portfolios of work aligned with their strengths and schedules aligned with their needs. Their physical and mental health, along with their perception of belonging, greatly improved. The company’s marketing efforts skyrocketed in effectiveness, and its market share expanded significantly.

At the team level, managers should support employees in this kind of job crafting. There are three ways that employees job craft: cognitive crafting, or changing their mindset about the tasks they do, allowing them to find more meaning and purpose in their work; relationship crafting, or reshaping their interactions with others in the workplace; and task crafting, or changing the responsibilities and the nature of certain tasks. Jenna and Celine received support for task crafting — to everyone’s benefit.

Strengths Alignment

Traditional approaches to person-job fit are primarily focused on finding individuals who “fit” jobs. Strengths-based work calls for tailoring jobs to align with what individuals do best.

As I discuss in my forthcoming book on neurodiversity and intersectional belonging at work, The Canary Code (Berrett-Koehler), we can learn a lot from the forward-looking companies that are unlocking the productivity of workers with diverse strengths and needs.

Consider Lemon Tree Hotels, a successful Indian hotel chain. Lemon Tree has 91 hotels in 57 locations and is committed to hiring disabled people. From the initial hire of a few deaf individuals, the company now employs people with Down syndrome, survivors of acid attacks, and people from many other marginalized groups. Strengths-based alignment is critical to their success.

Take the restaurant steward role, which consists of two very different tasks: making up tables and buffet presentations with precision, which most stewards find repetitive and boring, and more interactive tasks, such as explaining the menu, taking orders, and enticing guests to order additional drinks and dishes, which most find more enjoyable.

Lemon Tree’s founder, Patu Keswani, realized he could hire different people for the two parts of the job. He recognized that many workers with Down syndrome enjoyed — and excelled at — setting perfect tables and buffets. This allowed other stewards to focus on the social aspects of the job.

Lemon Tree also uses adaptive job mapping to ensure employee success. This means that various roles and the tasks within them are mapped in alternative ways for various disabilities. For those with Down syndrome, for example, tasks are presented as a sequence of images, and schedules are adapted to avoid night shifts. To integrate deaf employees, all employees receive training in Indian Sign Language.

Making jobs fit people pays off. For example, deaf room attendants are about 15% more productive than their hearing counterparts, and those with Down syndrome also outperform a typical employee. The company has won numerous awards for providing flexible work opportunities to previously excluded populations, and in just a few years became the third-largest hotel chain in India.

Legalite, a commercial law firm specializing in franchising and property founded by Marianne Marchesi, developed its own approach to comprehensive flexibility: Work by Design. While roles have core qualifications and skill requirements, employees — including disabled, neurodivergent, and pregnant professionals — are invited to co-design their jobs around their talents and interests. Some unique client offerings and products were built around employee skills and expertise, such as a blend of law and HR knowledge or legal and technical skills. For example, a lawyer with coding skills built Legalite’s documentation bot, Frankie. The firm has earned many accolades, including being named a 2022 Australian Business Awards Employer of Choice.

Andrei Cojocaru

Another great example of strengths-based alignment comes from Ultranauts, a U.S.–based, remote-first quality engineering company. According to the company’s website, “Seventy-five percent of Ultranauts [employees] are neurodivergent, the majority of our team members are autistic. Many of us are ADHDers and dyslexics, some of us are non-speaking and hard of hearing.”

Upon joining the company, all employees fill out a Biodex — a personal “user manual” — to communicate their preferred learning and work styles as well as their triggers and distracters. According to the company cofounder, Rajesh Anandan, all workplace processes, such as providing feedback, are designed to be caring and supportive. A promotion system based on an evaluation of one’s skills by community experts facilitates strengths-focused growth trajectories.

In recent years, the company’s revenue grew by 50% annually, and the quality of work employees delivered remained exceptional. Fortune 100 companies have chosen Ultranauts’s services over the global firms they were previously using.

Lemon Tree, Legalite, and Ultranauts are relatively young businesses (founded in 2002, 2017, and 2013, respectively) that are inclusive by design. However, I’ve also seen strengths-based approaches work in more traditional companies with much longer histories.

Consider Siemens AG, a Germany-based global engineering and technology company founded in 1847 that now employs more than 300,000 people worldwide. For the last three years, Siemens has worked with the consultancy Strengthscope to allow job candidates and line managers to find good matches between individuals and roles and map out personal and career development trajectories.

Strengthscope assessment is an optional element of the recruitment process. Candidates can choose to complete a survey and use their report to enrich the interview and explore how their strengths align with opportunities at Siemens. They can also opt to keep the report private. After the successful pilot, Siemens implemented a Strengthscope-based program in 27 countries and across six languages.

Flexibility Alignment

Although working from home has been the focus of many conversations about the future of work, flexibility in the workplace comes in many forms:

Schedule flexibility allows employees to adjust their working hours to fit their needs. For example, a parent may need to leave early in the afternoon to pick up their child, or a disabled employee may need to begin their days later to avoid mass transit during rush hour. It’s important to note that shift choice flexibility is possible for occupational groups that are often overlooked in discussions of flexible work, such as manufacturing and frontline service workers.

Place flexibility gives employees the choice to work from home, from a satellite office or coworking space, or from anywhere. This benefits employees who struggle with commuting or need a quiet environment to concentrate and supports many other needs.

Mode flexibility enables employees to work in their most effective mode, whether that is in person, virtually, or in a hybrid model with various ratios of time spent in particular places. For example, an employee with social anxiety might be best accommodated by mostly online work and meetings. Other employees may need in-person work or hybrid environments with a substantial share of in-person work to optimize structure, stimulation, and motivation. This type of flexibility is a crucial factor in attracting talent: One recent job growth report from the remote work technology company Scoop found that companies with hybrid or fully flexible work arrangements are hiring at two times the rate of companies that require employees to be in the office full time.

Continuity flexibility allows employees to take a leave of absence. Most countries provide paid maternity leaves, and paternity leaves are becoming increasingly common. But other types of extended time off — such as sabbaticals and leaves for mental health, caregiving, illness, or education — are also valued by employees. Germany, for example, has a provision for burnout recovery leave that can last several months. Offering continuity flexibility as a proactive measure rather than a reactive last resort for stressed-out workers can enhance employee well-being and increase organizational engagement.

Workload flexibility refers to the ability to work full time, part time, or to job share, typically with another part-time employee. This can give people who can’t work a traditional full-time schedule due to disabilities or life commitments, such as parenting, the opportunity to be employed. Workload flexibility is possible across all types of occupations and, combined with continuity flexibility, can accommodate a wide range of employee needs.

For organizations, offering part-time work is a fantastic recruitment and diversity tool, providing access to talent that otherwise would not apply. For example, when the insurance company Zurich added the words “part-time,” “job-share,” or “flexible working” to all its UK job advertisements, applications from women increased by 16%. More women also applied for and were hired for management roles.

There are many strategies for adopting hybrid work arrangements and avoiding the one-size-fits-none problem. From an organizational perspective, remote elements can be integrated in several ways that can be tailored to specific circumstances: people-split, in which some individuals work onsite, others remotely; time-split, in which all individuals work some days onsite and other days remotely; remote-first, in which remote work is a default, with face-to-face work as needed for specific roles or projects; or office-first, where in-person work is a default, with remote work as needed or allowed.

Sometimes the nature of a job requires a specific approach. Much work, however, can be successfully completed using any of them. Inviting employee participation in decision making may help identify a particular form of hybrid that will minimize stress and maximize productivity.

The legal profession is usually associated with grueling hours and the expectation that work takes priority above all else. Legalite could not be more different. Flexible work arrangements and schedules help neurodivergent and disabled employees develop careers while mostly working remotely. These arrangements also support pregnancy and parenting responsibilities. When needed, employees can swap working days to maintain their work-life balance. Employees can attend their children’s events, enjoy working holidays, or split their time between different locations — all while building their portfolios. Nobody has to take a demotion in exchange for flexible work.

Organizations don’t need to be disability- and neurodiversity-focused to realize the benefits of flexibility. Lockheed Martin, for example, a global defense and aerospace technology company headquartered in the United States, offers full-time employees a flexible schedule it calls 4XFlex. Employees work 75 hours over two weeks, over either eight or nine days, allowing for longer weekends. This schedule flexibility is often combined with remote work. Some departments in the U.S. government allow employees to work any eight hours within a 6 AM–6 PM window or work compressed schedules and use “banked” credit hours toward shorter days or days off. Employees can also take three hours of leave per week for fitness or wellness activities.

Around the world, some countries have embraced flexibility as a rule rather than an exception. Since 1996, Finland’s Working Hours Act has given most employees the right to adjust their working hours by starting or finishing up to three hours earlier or later than typical office hours. In 2020, that legislation was expanded to give full-time employees the option to work when and where they want for half of their working time. Similar levels of flexibility are found in the Netherlands. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that Finland consistently ranks as the world’s happiest country, with the Netherlands ranking in the top five.

Leading the Change

Despite the clear benefits of flexibility, many managers still resist offering flexible arrangements because they worry about diminished productivity, culture, and collaboration. A successful transition to flexible and strengths-based work will require new approaches to leadership. Here’s how to develop the necessary new skills and mindsets:

Focus on equity.

The concepts of equity and equality are often conflated, but they’re distinct. People are different, and providing equal opportunities for success requires equity — supporting people in ways that align with their needs and providing the tools that enable each person to work most effectively. Left-handed people typically accomplish more with left-handed tools. Particularly tall or short people need different physical setups for optimal performance. Requiring everyone to use right-handed tools or the standard-height furniture might be equal, but it’s counterproductive — and not equitable.

People with different strengths usually enjoy different kinds of work. For example, to support a sensory-sensitive employee who relishes deep work and is overwhelmed by noise, you might allocate more tasks that can be done from home or a private space. By contrast, you might give more field assignments to a highly social employee who needs novel experiences and struggles with sitting still.

Support open communication and a sense of belonging.

Aligning strengths in mutually beneficial ways can occur only when there’s an environment of psychological safety; in other words, when people know they won’t face repercussions for expressing their ideas, questions, or concerns. Creating an environment of authentic belonging means celebrating differences and affirming a range of communication methods, contributions, and work styles. Treating all team members with respect and dignity is essential to unlocking everyone’s full potential — and to creating a healthy culture.

Craft work as a team.

Many managers worry that nobody will want to do “boring” or “stressful” work. But, as demonstrated by Lemon Tree, welcoming the full range of diversity — rather than trying to hire the “average” person — means someone will see your “boring” as comfortably predictable, and your “stressful” as exhilarating. Job crafting can occur in teams, and in well-selected teams, individuals are likely to have complementary strengths. When teams and leaders craft work together, “undesirable” tasks get done, and both individual and organizational goals get met.

Train and support managers.

Finally, supporting employees with flexibility and care while ensuring results does not have to create an excessive demand on managers. Training supervisors to support others without burning out — a standard for clinicians — can help. So can bringing in specialists, such as psychologists or workplace wellness professionals, to care for managers’ and employees’ emotional needs and support stress relief. The strengths-based solution might be co-leadership by managers with complementary talents who focus on the aspects of leadership they do best. Systemically, work organization should support realistic workloads, including for managers.

We do our best work when we’re supported to function in the ways that work best for us. This happens when our workplaces support who we are, in all our diversity, and not the “average” worker — who does not exist. As the companies that are thriving with neurodivergent and disabled employees illustrate, it is possible to accommodate a wide range of talents. By helping every worker find alignment on strengths and flexibility, we can create a win-win in our new post-pandemic normal.