Studies on non-traditional work schedules have lately been a hot commodity, showing the extent to which employees desire greater flexibility in their professional lives.
Indeed, one out of two employees considers more flexible working hours to be one of the main ways employers can support productivity, according to a survey of 8,149 employees in nine countries recently conducted by Slack.
This is why many companies now offer their teams flexible working arrangements, whether in terms of remote working or working hours. The latter can be traditional (9 to 5) or staggered, depending on individual preference.
Alternative work schedules are particularly widespread in the United States, introduced by some companies in as early as 2010.
There, the traditional framework of the working week has turned on its head: gone are the Mondays to Fridays devoted to careers and the weekends to rest and personal life. US employees are now working less during the week and more on weekends, according to data cited by “Fortune” magazine.
More precisely, 10% of Americans with a hybrid working style (a mix of in-person and remote working) don’t work on one of the first five days of the week. Some 56% of them compensate for this by working on Saturdays.
Around a third of them do so at home (32%), while 24% prefer to work on company premises. This is undoubtedly a strategy to avoid being disturbed by the multiple distractions inherent to the weekend, such as childcare, household chores or social invitations.
While Saturday is gradually becoming a real working day, very few Americans work on Sunday – despite it being found to be the best day for sending emails, according to a report by Axios HQ.
Defining the new workflow
Whatever the case, the increase in Saturday working shows just how much hybridisation is tending to permanently change the way we work, and the pace at which we do it.
“Hybrid WFH has blurred the weekday/weekend boundary,” said Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University and a researcher with Work From Home Research, on X (formerly Twitter).
It may be good news for employees who want to work according to their own schedules. Early in the morning, late in the evening, during the night or even on the weekend – flexible workflows have the advantage of adapting to individual obligations, habits and desires, especially when combined with remote working.
It can be a gamechanger for those whose internal clock is incompatible with conventional office hours. And there are plenty of them: a French survey found that six out of 10 of employees there would like to work on nontraditional shifts.
But some experts are worried about the way the definition of the workweek is unravelling, fearing that the flexibility and autonomy will come at a high price for employees who opt for hybrid working. They may feel alone and stuck to their screens, while their colleagues have not yet started or have already finished their working day.
Shift work also requires discipline to respect the weekly days of rest. You shouldn’t be tempted to reply to an email message, check your notifications or reread a presentation – in other words, do some microtasking, on your day off.
For Bloom, flexible working is above all a question of balance. “This could be good by exploiting WFH flexibility, or bad if work-life boundaries have collapsed,” he explained on X.