Thought Leadership in Action

What happens when employees need a flexible work schedule, often in response to childcare needs? While it’s not uncommon for workers to arrange a telecommuting or flex time schedule with their employers, there can be a significant downside - flexibility bias. This phenomenon, involving prejudice and resentment from co-workers and even managers towards employees who need a flexible schedule, isn’t new. However, its impact may be more pervasive and damaging than many employees and employers realize.

A case in point: Researchers at Rice University and the University of California, San Diego, polled 266 faculty members at a top-ranked university about attitudes towards parents of young children who had flexible work schedules. The results, recently published in the journal Work and Occupations, show flexibility bias is a problem even in a university setting where flexible schedules are more common - and this prejudice can not only harm a worker’s career, but it can also negatively impact an organization’s bottom line.

While the study looked specifically at university workplace bias against scientists and engineers who use flexible work arrangements, the conclusions likely shed light on workplace flexibility bias across a wide spectrum of organizations. “Because this is an academic setting, faculty tend to have a great deal of freedom to re-arrange their busy schedules to accommodate family responsibilities,” Erin Cech, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice and the study’s lead author, explains. “We imagine that the effects of flexibility stigma on job satisfaction and employee turnover might be even more counterproductive in professional workplaces that have less schedule control.”

“As researchers, we’re interested in understanding the gap between the traditional 9-to-5 work setting and what workers actually need,” Cech continues. “The majority of parents are in the workforce today, yet the expectations and arrangements of work have stayed more or less the same as they were post-World War II. We’re trying to understand this mismatch and its consequences.”

Financial Fall-Out

Even when a flexible work arrangement is provided through an organization’s policy, approved by management and seemingly supported in the workplace, flexibility bias still frequently exists. The result, the researchers say, is an increase in employee dissatisfaction across the board.

“Workplaces where this bias exist are more likely to have a toxic culture that hurts the entire department, not only in terms of work-life balance but also retention and job satisfaction, which may affect department productivity,“ says study co-author Mary Blair-Loy, an associate professor of sociology at UC San Diego.

The study also found that people who reported an awareness of flexibility stigma in their departments, regardless of whether these employees were parents themselves, expressed unhappiness with their own work-life balance and said they were more likely to leave their jobs.

This potential consequence of flexibility stigma, employee turnover, can be costly. Cech notes, for example, that startup packages for new science and engineering faculty range from $90,000 to $400,000. “This suggests that reducing flexibility stigma would not only be good for workers, but good for the bottom line as well,” she concludes.

How HR Leaders Can Help Stop Flexibility Bias

Because HR leaders play an important role in driving company culture, the way they accept, promote and communicate flexibility policies in the workplace is important in fighting flexibility bias. “Dealing with work-life balance issues is not just about instituting the right polices, but it is also about undermining the stigma that comes along with using those policies,” sociologist Cech notes.

A strategy that may be helpful for HR leaders, according to Blair-Loy, founding director of the Center for Research on Gender in the Professions, is to recognize that employees who themselves do not need flexible working arrangements for childcare or other reasons, but who support flexible policies, can be allies in supporting a more inclusive working environment for everyone.

In their book Rapid Retooling: Developing World-Class Organizations in a Rapidly Changing World (ASTD Publishing), authors Lawrence Polsky, managing partner at PeopleNRG, a global leadership and team consulting firm based in Princeton, New Jersey, and executive leader coach and PeopleNRG co-founder Antoine Gerschel, explore how organizations must “retool” for success in the 21 st century. They use this term to describe incorporating technical, economic and societal changes in an ongoing, cyclical process to create workplace culture that embraces both resiliency and flexibility.

A key factor in accomplishing this, the authors write, is creating a leadership culture that respects and supports work-life balance – including acceptance of flexible working arrangements. They advise HR pros to be clear about the responsibilities and time commitments of a job during the hiring process but to also be flexible, allowing people to get their jobs done in whatever way works for both the employees and the organization.

In a recent interview with Human Resource Executive Online concerning flexibility bias, Carol Sladek, a work-life consulting leader at Aon Hewitt in Chicago, emphasized the role of managers in finding ways to reduce or eliminate the flexibility stigma. While well-designed guidelines are needed to help managers respond to requests for flexible working arrangements, Sladek asserts they also need specific education and training to help them better embrace flexibility in the workplace.