What is work flexibility to you? Do you have work flexibility? What is your work flexibility? If you could what would be the work flexibility to work best for your life?
To me work flexibility is when you are:
1. Need to be available at least once daily. Available Monday - Friday from 10am to 2pm. During these 4 hours, yes you should be in the office but if you are not you can not not have a video call/chat, answer text messages and emails are necessarily. I understand life happens and we don't control everything that happens in our life but as hard as we may try do control majority of our life's majority of the time.
2. Life is real. If you need to go get your tires changes on your car or pick up your kid from school or day care then go do that.
3. Timing. If you didn't sleep well last night or you had a late night due to X thing, then deal with it. If need be, come into work at 6am if you need to, come into work at 1pm if thats whats necessary. I have come into this problem a few times where I couldn't sleep or threw my shoulder out and just needed to have the morning off to deal with that. Or even dealing with the car, dentist, optometrist or even hair appointments. It's far easier to deal with things during the week then on the weekends.
4. Busy work. I have worked many different jobs in my life and one of the things that I have noticed that all positions have this. There is either a specific time in a day or days of the week (pending on your company, only real variant I feel) where there is really not a whole lot to do. Where you are doing busy work just to keep your self morning. I think to fill this void and to make people more productive, is to give them the time to be more productive. Let me take certain days off or have the morning or afternoon off to deal with life. I could also take a 2-3 hour lunch as well. I could do split shifts knowing that at certain times that I have to work and when I do that there is always work available.
5. Go where I go. After all of this I would also like to have the flexibility to take my work where ever I go. If I am sick why can't I do a couple of hours of work from home. In the winter if I go an visit my parents (who live in a small town in the snow belt and I get stuck), or I go to the family cottage or a sick parents being able to work at 2am or 2pm can potentially be the real life changer.
6. Hour stacking. To be able to work 10 hours Monday, Tuesday and Thursday to be able to get Friday off could be something to consider. I wouldn't want to be able to take 1 day off a week but it would help with living life.
What are your thoughts? Would you want to be able to work but kind of whenever it suits you? Would you want to be able to work like this long term? Would you rather just work for yourself?
Ultimately, what does work flexibility mean.