24 ms·

Flexible working can make you ill, experts say

166 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

kevingadd 11y ago
I've been on an always-on project for the last year or so where taking time away from work means that there's more to catch up on when I come back, no matter what. In some cases taking too long away from the project means a huge pile of other people's mistakes have accumulated, and I have to go in and clean them up. Incidentally, I've also spent a portion of the last year on medical leave. The two have interacted pretty poorly so far, and I can definitely confirm part of the article's argument, at least in my case: When your work and personal lives are intertwined like it describes, the stress never goes away and you're constantly amped up. It's not good. I am happy to note that nobody sent work emails over the holidays, so that's nice - at least then you get a chance to use that time to disconnect and get some distance from things and spend time with your family.
cjfont 11y ago
Well this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has been following what others have mentioned is a best practice for working from home: Set work boundaries, both in terms of time and physical location, as to what constitutes work and what is otherwise personal/family time. Enforce set hours as to when you are actually working as opposed to when you are doing something else, and let others in your household know what they are. Create a separate physical environment that you can mentally associate as being where you perform work, and work only, and take any other activities such as social life and games out of it -- preferably using a different computer altogether. Setting virtual walls where work begins/ends can greatly reduce the cognitive overhead your brain has to endure when trying to separate what is work from the rest of your life, and thus lower overall stress.
Retric 11y ago
This has little to do with Flexible scheduling. A waiter may have a flexible schedule, but there not going to worry about checking there work emails. It's really a problem with always being available, a 9-5 worker that checks there e-mail every night is going to have the same issues.
paublyrne 11y ago
From working in co-working spaces, I've met a lot of freelance people, and some people have it worked out. Set hours, strictly observed. The same days and hours each week, whatever they may be, and then life can be planned. It's very easy to slip into 'flexible' hours when doing freelance, which can often mean working all day, any day of the week, not taking proper breaks, for weeks on end. I've done that, felt awful for long periods, and needed time to recuperate afterwards. My body gave me a lot of signals to communicate that this wasn't good for me. I overheard another guy in one office who was doing similar hours to me, telling his Dad on the phone that he was sleeping really badly, a problem he hadn't suffered from before. And of course that made perfect sense.
- kilroy123 11y ago
  Same here. I can be somewhat flexible about when I work during the day. I choose not to. Instead I often work out of a co-working space and work the same hours daily.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vox_mollis 11y ago
This strikes me as very odd. For the vast majority of human history, work has always been something that was interwoven into our lives. From hunting and gathering, to farming and ranching, to woodworking and blacksmithing, and so on, up until the industrial revolution, nearly everyone "worked from home" and I'm unaware of any documented ill health effects from this. Intuitively, I'd suppose that aggregate stress levels actually rose with the advent of commuting to dedicated factory/office workplaces, as factory quotas and office micromanagement are far more psychologically demanding than the farm or home workshop in which you ( or your remote, usually undemanding lord, in the case of feudal work relationships ) set your own schedule and degree of competitiveness.
- xyzzy4 11y ago
  Well that might be true, but when you're at home you have more choices of what you can be doing at any one moment, and too much choice can be stressful. Also when you're at work you have more external pressure from your peers to get busy, while at home you need to be more self-motivated, which is more mentally difficult.
- cjfont 11y ago
  In each of those cases, none of those occupations can be really be interwoven into your life as tightly as a job where +90% of your labor is done via a laptop computer. If you're a farmer, woodworker, etc. you still need a separate place of work from where you live, be it a workshop or the fields. In the evening when the farmer returns to his house to rest, there is no question he's done for the day, and he can fully relax and sleep. The dangerous mindset is that if you're capable of working whenever and wherever you are, then why should you ever really disconnect? This problem is an epidemic with people who don't know how to create a mental separation between work life and everything else, and I would argue that although it's easier to fall in the trap if you work over a VPN, it can also happen for any worker that is permitted/encouraged to work at any time of the day regardless of the situation.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    what about the mending of things around the house or the keeping of animals?
artpepper 11y ago
You really do need to set boundaries, so the article's not wrong. On the other hand, I couldn't juggle my child's preschool and my spouse's teaching schedule, if I didn't have flex time.
- pc86 11y ago
  The article isn't actually talking about flex time or flexible schedules. It's talking about "grazing" your work, always being available, keeping track of work emails after hours or answering work calls outside your scheduled time, etc.
sz4kerto 11y ago
It can. I just worked through Christmas, without any real external pressure. As always, putting in extra hours requires much more extra effort than the reward you're getting for it, so it does not make too much sense.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Hm. Fixed working can make you ill, too. Better of two evils.
jedberg 11y ago
I was just thinking to myself yesterday how sometimes it would be nice to have one of those jobs where when you are away from work, there is no work to be done. Like working in a factory or something, where there is literally nothing I can do during the off hours other than relax. This through crossed my mind because I had just finished two weeks of vacation where I literally did nothing related to work, and it was really relaxing.
- phyllostachys 11y ago
  I've also thought about that a lot. I had a friend at a previous employer who considered starting a food truck business instead of doing software development.
  - Raphmedia 11y ago
    I do web development with flexible hours and I don't even have internet outside of work. Learn to say no to your boss. Work, computers and internet are only a small part of life.
    - kevingadd 11y ago
      Saying no to your boss is a nice policy, but most of the destructive aspects of modern tech jobs are not optional things. 'Saying no' to those things means not having a job (at least in this field)
      - jazzyk 11y ago
        It depends.I am a consultant and have worked for many different companies on many different projects. In most cases, people say "yes" without even being asked by their bosses - out of (imaginary) fear of losing their jobs. We are fortunate to work in an industry where, even in a stagnant economy, finding another job is not a huge problem, should it come to this in rare cases (although looking for work is never fun, I know). Please man up and don't do it to yourselves and to other people. That said, outside of paid work, I often work/read up on stuff which benefits ME, whether it is professional or personal development.
VLM 11y ago
The article is incredibly unclear or muddled: > "but If I wasn’t at home with my kids it costs me something." > "To create free evenings, Veenendaal limited the working day" Or is it more like: > "evening events like a recent programme of talks on the food chain." Is it: > "Flexible working policies can also raise the risk of poor working conditions" Or is it more like: > "And past the table a dozen people work at long desks on chains." Is it: > "while the blurring of lines between work and home life is stressful for some people." Or is it more like: > "for staff lunches, yoga classes" (Seriously, I can't get away from work even to eat or sweat?)
grecy 11y ago
My last company tried very hard to make me "on call" without any extra compensation. I think it's very important to separate your work life from your home life so you have time to switch off and decompress. Never give your personal phone number(s) or email address to bosses at work - carry a separate work phone if you must, and turn it off or leave it at the office. Also don't check your work email from home, ever. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) where work pay you a pittance to use your personal cell as a work phone is a joke. There is no universe where it's good for you. If you set this expectation from the very beginning, it will be much easier than trying to change to this down the road.
- 67726e 11y ago
  > My last company tried very hard to make me "on call" without any extra compensation. I had a company try the same shit (on top of even more shit). Took a job, the pay was... not terrible. However they oddly took the time to stress that as a programmer I am exempt for overtime. After a while I was put as the "on-call" guy for deployments and crashes. I thought it was just during work hours, since we had dedicated sysadmins at the company, but it was in fact nights and weekends. The fact that they hid that during the interview and waited a couple months in when any other job offers I would have had dried up can only be a calculated move on their part. When they asked me if it was going to be a problem, I told them yes, I quit. If you're going to try to take whole weeks of my free-time for the company you sure as shit better compensate me for it. I'm not going to spend my weekends sitting around the house when I could be out hiking, kayaking, or fishing and spending time with my friends. Especially not when you go out of your way to stress you don't owe me anything additional, and especially not when it's done in such a conniving manner.
  - samstave 11y ago
    Yeah, I've worked at places where we give everyone a bonus for being on call for a period. This was years ago, but I think we added $500 to anyone's paycheck if they spent the week during that period to be on call.
    - 11y ago
ianstallings 11y ago
If you work from home you have to set boundaries and go out of your way to set the tone. Meaning, everyone knows you are working those hours at that place everyday. When you're not within those hours you're not working, period. This is how I worked from home when I telecommuted. Being a startup founder now, I don't really find a good balance and my health is suffering. So I'm trying hard to follow my own rules this year. It's tough. There is so much work to do.
thegayngler 11y ago
I usually try to learn/use a language I don't use at work. Then take a leisurely approach to learning the new language. Many times it works. Many times it doesn't. I try to do things I know I won't be doing at work right now. The stuff I do outside of work is just because I'm interested in it. I also workout, watch TV and meet up with friends etc... which involve not being at work mentally.
BuckRogers 11y ago
Instead of all these methodologies for managing programming teams, I've often wondered why no one came up with methodologies for managing employees working from home. That seems to be an untapped market for the "methodology" folks. I've worked from home for years, and not as a freelancer. I just have my work hours like I would in any office. It's worked out well for me, but it would be difficult for many people to hack it due to the extra discipline it requires. I can see why companies don't want people doing it but there's definitely big economic potential held back, and environmental/mental harm done from the daily travel into the office. I grew up in rural Iowa and worked the typical farm boy jobs, went to school all the way through in Iowa then lived in Chicago, Nord Pas de Calais (France) and now Austin. The majority of the population that doesn't come from a similar diverse cultural background (talking true, meaningful rural cultural diversity here not skintone) and there's a lot to be said for having "grit" ingrained in who you are, it helps with handling remote work in my opinion.
Allower 11y ago
In other news, running can make you ill. Some runners don't know their limits and over-train. What kind of idiot publishes this garbage?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 11y ago
The place I worked in a few years ago handled this the best. We had a level 2/3 support team embedded in our division who handled 90% of calls. The calls were taken by junior folks who were overtime eligible, they rotated 1 week cycles and received 20% of their hourly rate, plus a 3 hour minimum for time worked. They handled all vendor dispatch, all telco callouts. For the resolver groups, there was a severity-1 process, with an on-call manager & call tree to the higher skill people. People were on call for two-week cycles, but any call-out to these people was treated as a defect in the process. The average was 2-3 escalated calls to senior staff on different teams per month, out of about 5-7000 calls total.
sreitshamer 11y ago
I just read this interview with Brunello Cucinelli and found it inspiring. "In this company, you cannot send emails after 5:30 PM, when the company closes for the evening. The day after, when you turn up for work, what are you like? You are a still person. You are better." http://pi.co/brunello-cucinelli-2/ http://pi.co/brunello-cucinelli-2/
forrestbrazeal 11y ago
If you work in ops, you will get paged sometimes, and you'll handle maintenance windows/unplanned emergencies during off hours. It's the cost of doing business. I don't see this as "flexible work", necessarily - we don't say that a nurse on a 14-hour shift has flexible hours. That said, if you handle a midnight outage, your boss had better be ok with you coming in late the next morning.

166 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

I've been on an always-on project for the last year or so where taking time away from work means that there's more to catch up on when I come back, no matter what. In some cases taking too long away from the project means a huge pile of other people's mistakes have accumulated, and I have to go in and clean them up. Incidentally, I've also spent a portion of the last year on medical leave. The two have interacted pretty poorly so far, and I can definitely confirm part of the article's argument, at least in my case: When your work and personal lives are intertwined like it describes, the stress never goes away and you're constantly amped up. It's not good. I am happy to note that nobody sent work emails over the holidays, so that's nice - at least then you get a chance to use that time to disconnect and get some distance from things and spend time with your family.

cjfont 11y ago

Well this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has been following what others have mentioned is a best practice for working from home: Set work boundaries, both in terms of time and physical location, as to what constitutes work and what is otherwise personal/family time. Enforce set hours as to when you are actually working as opposed to when you are doing something else, and let others in your household know what they are. Create a separate physical environment that you can mentally associate as being where you perform work, and work only, and take any other activities such as social life and games out of it -- preferably using a different computer altogether. Setting virtual walls where work begins/ends can greatly reduce the cognitive overhead your brain has to endure when trying to separate what is work from the rest of your life, and thus lower overall stress.

Retric 11y ago

This has little to do with Flexible scheduling. A waiter may have a flexible schedule, but there not going to worry about checking there work emails. It's really a problem with always being available, a 9-5 worker that checks there e-mail every night is going to have the same issues.

paublyrne 11y ago

From working in co-working spaces, I've met a lot of freelance people, and some people have it worked out. Set hours, strictly observed. The same days and hours each week, whatever they may be, and then life can be planned. It's very easy to slip into 'flexible' hours when doing freelance, which can often mean working all day, any day of the week, not taking proper breaks, for weeks on end. I've done that, felt awful for long periods, and needed time to recuperate afterwards. My body gave me a lot of signals to communicate that this wasn't good for me. I overheard another guy in one office who was doing similar hours to me, telling his Dad on the phone that he was sleeping really badly, a problem he hadn't suffered from before. And of course that made perfect sense.

kilroy123 11y ago
Same here. I can be somewhat flexible about when I work during the day. I choose not to. Instead I often work out of a co-working space and work the same hours daily.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

vox_mollis 11y ago

This strikes me as very odd. For the vast majority of human history, work has always been something that was interwoven into our lives. From hunting and gathering, to farming and ranching, to woodworking and blacksmithing, and so on, up until the industrial revolution, nearly everyone "worked from home" and I'm unaware of any documented ill health effects from this. Intuitively, I'd suppose that aggregate stress levels actually rose with the advent of commuting to dedicated factory/office workplaces, as factory quotas and office micromanagement are far more psychologically demanding than the farm or home workshop in which you ( or your remote, usually undemanding lord, in the case of feudal work relationships ) set your own schedule and degree of competitiveness.

xyzzy4 11y ago
Well that might be true, but when you're at home you have more choices of what you can be doing at any one moment, and too much choice can be stressful. Also when you're at work you have more external pressure from your peers to get busy, while at home you need to be more self-motivated, which is more mentally difficult.
cjfont 11y ago
In each of those cases, none of those occupations can be really be interwoven into your life as tightly as a job where +90% of your labor is done via a laptop computer. If you're a farmer, woodworker, etc. you still need a separate place of work from where you live, be it a workshop or the fields. In the evening when the farmer returns to his house to rest, there is no question he's done for the day, and he can fully relax and sleep. The dangerous mindset is that if you're capable of working whenever and wherever you are, then why should you ever really disconnect? This problem is an epidemic with people who don't know how to create a mental separation between work life and everything else, and I would argue that although it's easier to fall in the trap if you work over a VPN, it can also happen for any worker that is permitted/encouraged to work at any time of the day regardless of the situation.
- afarrell 11y ago
  what about the mending of things around the house or the keeping of animals?

artpepper 11y ago

You really do need to set boundaries, so the article's not wrong. On the other hand, I couldn't juggle my child's preschool and my spouse's teaching schedule, if I didn't have flex time.

pc86 11y ago
The article isn't actually talking about flex time or flexible schedules. It's talking about "grazing" your work, always being available, keeping track of work emails after hours or answering work calls outside your scheduled time, etc.

sz4kerto 11y ago

It can. I just worked through Christmas, without any real external pressure. As always, putting in extra hours requires much more extra effort than the reward you're getting for it, so it does not make too much sense.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Hm. Fixed working can make you ill, too. Better of two evils.

jedberg 11y ago

I was just thinking to myself yesterday how sometimes it would be nice to have one of those jobs where when you are away from work, there is no work to be done. Like working in a factory or something, where there is literally nothing I can do during the off hours other than relax. This through crossed my mind because I had just finished two weeks of vacation where I literally did nothing related to work, and it was really relaxing.

phyllostachys 11y ago
I've also thought about that a lot. I had a friend at a previous employer who considered starting a food truck business instead of doing software development.
- Raphmedia 11y ago
  I do web development with flexible hours and I don't even have internet outside of work. Learn to say no to your boss. Work, computers and internet are only a small part of life.
  - kevingadd 11y ago
    Saying no to your boss is a nice policy, but most of the destructive aspects of modern tech jobs are not optional things. 'Saying no' to those things means not having a job (at least in this field)
    - jazzyk 11y ago
      It depends.I am a consultant and have worked for many different companies on many different projects. In most cases, people say "yes" without even being asked by their bosses - out of (imaginary) fear of losing their jobs. We are fortunate to work in an industry where, even in a stagnant economy, finding another job is not a huge problem, should it come to this in rare cases (although looking for work is never fun, I know). Please man up and don't do it to yourselves and to other people. That said, outside of paid work, I often work/read up on stuff which benefits ME, whether it is professional or personal development.

VLM 11y ago

The article is incredibly unclear or muddled: > "but If I wasn’t at home with my kids it costs me something." > "To create free evenings, Veenendaal limited the working day" Or is it more like: > "evening events like a recent programme of talks on the food chain." Is it: > "Flexible working policies can also raise the risk of poor working conditions" Or is it more like: > "And past the table a dozen people work at long desks on chains." Is it: > "while the blurring of lines between work and home life is stressful for some people." Or is it more like: > "for staff lunches, yoga classes" (Seriously, I can't get away from work even to eat or sweat?)

grecy 11y ago

My last company tried very hard to make me "on call" without any extra compensation. I think it's very important to separate your work life from your home life so you have time to switch off and decompress. Never give your personal phone number(s) or email address to bosses at work - carry a separate work phone if you must, and turn it off or leave it at the office. Also don't check your work email from home, ever. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) where work pay you a pittance to use your personal cell as a work phone is a joke. There is no universe where it's good for you. If you set this expectation from the very beginning, it will be much easier than trying to change to this down the road.

67726e 11y ago
> My last company tried very hard to make me "on call" without any extra compensation. I had a company try the same shit (on top of even more shit). Took a job, the pay was... not terrible. However they oddly took the time to stress that as a programmer I am exempt for overtime. After a while I was put as the "on-call" guy for deployments and crashes. I thought it was just during work hours, since we had dedicated sysadmins at the company, but it was in fact nights and weekends. The fact that they hid that during the interview and waited a couple months in when any other job offers I would have had dried up can only be a calculated move on their part. When they asked me if it was going to be a problem, I told them yes, I quit. If you're going to try to take whole weeks of my free-time for the company you sure as shit better compensate me for it. I'm not going to spend my weekends sitting around the house when I could be out hiking, kayaking, or fishing and spending time with my friends. Especially not when you go out of your way to stress you don't owe me anything additional, and especially not when it's done in such a conniving manner.
- samstave 11y ago
  Yeah, I've worked at places where we give everyone a bonus for being on call for a period. This was years ago, but I think we added $500 to anyone's paycheck if they spent the week during that period to be on call.
  - 11y ago

ianstallings 11y ago

If you work from home you have to set boundaries and go out of your way to set the tone. Meaning, everyone knows you are working those hours at that place everyday. When you're not within those hours you're not working, period. This is how I worked from home when I telecommuted. Being a startup founder now, I don't really find a good balance and my health is suffering. So I'm trying hard to follow my own rules this year. It's tough. There is so much work to do.

thegayngler 11y ago

I usually try to learn/use a language I don't use at work. Then take a leisurely approach to learning the new language. Many times it works. Many times it doesn't. I try to do things I know I won't be doing at work right now. The stuff I do outside of work is just because I'm interested in it. I also workout, watch TV and meet up with friends etc... which involve not being at work mentally.

BuckRogers 11y ago

Instead of all these methodologies for managing programming teams, I've often wondered why no one came up with methodologies for managing employees working from home. That seems to be an untapped market for the "methodology" folks. I've worked from home for years, and not as a freelancer. I just have my work hours like I would in any office. It's worked out well for me, but it would be difficult for many people to hack it due to the extra discipline it requires. I can see why companies don't want people doing it but there's definitely big economic potential held back, and environmental/mental harm done from the daily travel into the office. I grew up in rural Iowa and worked the typical farm boy jobs, went to school all the way through in Iowa then lived in Chicago, Nord Pas de Calais (France) and now Austin. The majority of the population that doesn't come from a similar diverse cultural background (talking true, meaningful rural cultural diversity here not skintone) and there's a lot to be said for having "grit" ingrained in who you are, it helps with handling remote work in my opinion.

Allower 11y ago

In other news, running can make you ill. Some runners don't know their limits and over-train. What kind of idiot publishes this garbage?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Spooky23 11y ago

The place I worked in a few years ago handled this the best. We had a level 2/3 support team embedded in our division who handled 90% of calls. The calls were taken by junior folks who were overtime eligible, they rotated 1 week cycles and received 20% of their hourly rate, plus a 3 hour minimum for time worked. They handled all vendor dispatch, all telco callouts. For the resolver groups, there was a severity-1 process, with an on-call manager & call tree to the higher skill people. People were on call for two-week cycles, but any call-out to these people was treated as a defect in the process. The average was 2-3 escalated calls to senior staff on different teams per month, out of about 5-7000 calls total.

sreitshamer 11y ago

I just read this interview with Brunello Cucinelli and found it inspiring. "In this company, you cannot send emails after 5:30 PM, when the company closes for the evening. The day after, when you turn up for work, what are you like? You are a still person. You are better." http://pi.co/brunello-cucinelli-2/ http://pi.co/brunello-cucinelli-2/

forrestbrazeal 11y ago

If you work in ops, you will get paged sometimes, and you'll handle maintenance windows/unplanned emergencies during off hours. It's the cost of doing business. I don't see this as "flexible work", necessarily - we don't say that a nurse on a 14-hour shift has flexible hours. That said, if you handle a midnight outage, your boss had better be ok with you coming in late the next morning.