Work-life flexibility is the ability to manage where and when you work. More specifically, managing where you work is about having boundary control, while managing when you work is about having control over the schedule.
Boundary control is defined as the extent to which you have control over the integration of your work role and your personal and family life. From a best practice perspective, this flexibility is valuable for fostering boundary control to help employees meet simultaneous work and home demands — their work-life balance. However, according to a study published recently in Human Resource Management and led by Purdue University’s Ellen Ernst Kossek, the successful implementation of a work-life balance policy in organizations has been affected by two key issues.
One is that most organizations tend to believe that they can do little to provide work-life flexibility to employees whose jobs are designed with limited work-life flexibility — the so-called work-life flexibility “have nots,” such as frontline workers directly involved in essential tasks such as customer service, production, and service delivery. These individuals are particularly susceptible to burnout due to the low control they can have over boundaries and schedules.
The second issue is that employees with greater access to work-life flexibility — the so-called work-life flexibility “haves” — often do not take advantage of their flexibility to engage more fully in their work and family roles. This could be due to a lack of employee awareness about the work-life flexibility support provided by the organization and concerns by career-oriented employees about its possible negative consequences for their career advancement.
Kossek, the Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor of Management at Purdue’s Mitch Daniels School of Business, was the lead author of the study. Her co-authors were Caitlin Porter, an associate professor at the University of Memphis; Lindsay Mecham Rosokha, a clinical assistant professor at Purdue’s Daniels School; Kelly Schwind Wilson, a professor at the Daniels School; Deborah E. Rupp, a professor at George Mason University; and Jared Law-Penrose, a Purdue PhD alum and professor at Le Moyne College.
“The issue of flexibility and work-life support is something that organizations have thought about for a long time,” Kossek says. “And we saw during Covid that organizations did become more flexible, particularly for people who could control where and when they work. But still, we didn’t do very much for people who were frontline workers. And now, post pandemic, a lot of companies think that they can’t do anything for people who don’t have schedule or boundary control, such as janitors, secretaries, nurses and police.
“At the same time, for workers who have that access to flexibility, we've seen calls back to the office. There’s always been kind of a career stigma to using flexibility for personal needs. So, these are dilemmas that organizations have, and this study digs deeper into how to improve the implementation of the work-life policies organizations have and think about how these policies might vary in effectiveness according to the job context — how can you really create work-life supportive context for people in different jobs with different job characteristics and leader support.”
Organizations often assume that it is sufficient to merely offer work-life flexibility to facilitate better work engagement. However, according to Kossek, what often gets overlooked is that people not only have different demands from their jobs, but also in their family life. In addition, managers are often unaware of how to foster work-life support.
“Looking at what we can do to improve people’s lives depending on their job is so important,” she says. “Today many organizations offer lip service to work-life issues. They put in work-life policies, don’t train people, and forget about job design matters. But people have different needs depending on what they have to do in their job. Once you offer a work-life balance policy or think about how to create a work-life supportive organization, it is important to also look at people’s different job demands and constraints. There are some jobs where you have to be on site and yet you could hopefully go home and be able to disconnect. There are also jobs where people may have trouble disconnecting. And there are people who are constrained by having a supervisor who is not motivated to enable work-life support. This is a dilemma — how do we make the workplace work for everybody?”
The study posited that the training of line managers in work-life support will promote a work-life supportive context, providing solutions to the issues that organizations face in supporting employee work-life balance. Using a year-long randomized field experiment across 17 departments at an unnamed large public research university, the study found that for individuals with little control over boundaries and schedules, having a line manager who is trained in work-life support reduces emotional exhaustion — a key component of burnout for employees in frontline jobs. So, contrary to the widespread belief, the study shows that even for employees occupying jobs designed with less work-life flexibility, organizations can take action to create a more supportive work-life context, which helps to mitigate employee burnout.
“This is important because for a lot of people, improving their job context by training leaders to think more about flexibility and be more supportive is the first step towards their well- being,” Kossek says. “It was interesting to see you can help people feel emotionally better in terms of emotional exhaustion because in the work-life literature, we conflate support for the family role and support for the person’s well-being. This is a first step toward bringing people up to a starting line, because if you're in an inflexible job without control, you're not even able to give time to your family.”
In addition, the study found that having a line manager trained in work-life support encourages those with greater work-life flexibility to take advantage of existing work-life balance policies and increases family engagement of these employees. “If their leader received training, people who were in jobs providing control over work boundaries were able to give more time to their family,” Kossek says. “Maybe they felt freer to go to children’s activities and invest in caring for their family. You can have flexibility policies, but unless leaders are also trained in promoting them, people may or may not use that flexibility to support their family.”
In this context, the study shows that organizations can benefit from training line managers in how to provide work-life support. This training promotes a work-life supportive context that is likely to positively impact employees, but in different ways, depending on the degree their jobs were designed with work-life flexibility.
“Companies don’t invest enough in training leaders to see this as part of their job. Just some attention to having leaders think about this is important,” Kossek says. “For example, doing 45 minutes or so of training of leaders to think about how to be more supportive to others and also when it comes to their own lives. I’d like to see us really look at work-life support as a core job characteristic for organizations and also something that’s a core part of what leaders can do.”
However, work-life support training of line managers was not found to enhance employee work engagement, irrespective of employee work-life flexibility.
“This finding was interesting, given that a lot of companies think being flexible will make people more motivated in their job,” Kossek says. “If organizations could partner with scholars, we might be able to unpack more how the training actually works and what leaders can do to motivate employees and foster well-being on and off the job given boundaries between work and family are increasingly linked.”
