The Path to Flexibility
Flexible scheduling necessarily means somebody will be working at times you think they shouldn't be.
I’m typing this while The Pip sits on the far side of the living room, in school, and SteelyKid is about to go upstairs for the start of the eighth-grade day. The kids’ school has declared an all-virtual day today, not for anything directly pandemic-related (there’s no active outbreak in the school, or anything), but because of a lack of bus drivers. This has been an issue all year— we’ve had a couple of days when The Pip’s bus didn’t run— but they hit a critical point today where they just couldn’t staff enough routes to make in-person school practical..
This is annoying for us, but not a major crisis. I’m on sabbatical, not teaching this term, and Kate’s office is on a plan where everybody works from home on Fridays anyway. And even if she did have to go to work and I had a class to teach, the kids are old enough that I can leave them home alone for a couple of hours and not worry that they’re going to burn the place down. We’re enormously lucky to have such flexibility in our schedules.
Today’s awkward arrangement has me thinking a bit about schedule flexibility in general, though, and how it ought to be more common. This brought to mind a disagreement I often have with people in academic Twitter, namely the assertion that nobody should send email or do other work outside of “normal business hours.” The argument being that this creates pressure for other people to also be available outside of those hours.
I disagree with this because one of the biggest selling points of a career in academia, to me, is precisely the freedom to work outside of “normal business hours.” A great feature of my job is that I’ve got the ability to re-arrange my schedule in whatever way is most convenient, so I can stay home with the kids if that’s needed, or go run errands during the middle of the day, and so on. As long as my classes get taught, my books get written, and my committee service grinds along at the usual pace, it doesn’t matter when I do any of those tasks.
That flexibility necessarily means that some things are going to get done at odd hours, though. If I’m going home at 3pm to make sure the kids do homework and get dinner at a reasonable hour— as I do most days— some work stuff is going to get moved to other parts of the day to make up for it. I’m going to be answering emails at 7pm or 7am, and while I could pretend otherwise by scheduling them to send between 9am and 5pm, that seems silly and pointless. And arguably counterproductive, should it happen that the people I’m emailing are also shifting work out of the middle part of the day in a similar manner.
The weird part of this is that some of the very same people who share advice into my timeline about never sending email after 5pm will also retweet calls for more flexible scheduling on the grounds that it’s more family-friendly. But, really, you can’t have both— what makes flexibility family-friendly is that it allows people with family responsibilities to move work out of the 9-5 block. An inevitable result of allowing flexibility is that people will be doing work at different times, and some of those times are inevitably going to be times when some people don’t think others should be working.
To return a bit to a rant from last week, this is one of the reasons I find the collective inability of faculty to use email so vexing. In some ways, “don’t send email outside of normal business hours” could be seen as a symptom of that more general inability. The whole point of email as a medium, its great advantage over voice calls and texts and especially in-person meetings, is that it’s asynchronous. I can send a message when I have time, and the recipient can respond when they have time, and everybody’s happy. At least in principle.
The obvious way to try to reconcile the “we need flexible schedules” tweets with the “nobody should be seen to be working outside business hours” ones is as an ideal world/ real world divide. That is, in an ideal world, everybody would be free to work whenever they like, but until we get there we’re stuck with the 9-5 block schedule.
That seems fatally flawed to me, though, in that the only way to move away from everybody being bound to a fixed schedule is to get people used to work being done at non-standard hours. Which can only be done by sending emails at 7pm or 7am (and along with that refusing meetings and emails at 9am or 3pm when family responsibilities require), and accepting that as a routine part of the workplace. People who have flexible schedules need to use them, and show that they can work as a first step toward making greater flexibility available to others.
(This is similar to another pet peeve, which is “No profile of a female scientist should make any mention of her appearance or family because that plays into stereotypes.” That seems backwards to me: the right answer, to my mind, is to make sure that every profile of a male scientist makes reference to his appearance and family, until those elements no longer register as stereotypically female. (I also think that’s much more common than some would have you believe, but that’s another rant…) Avoiding any reference to lives outside of work just feeds the much more pernicious stereotype of scientists in general as remote and alien.)
Kind of a brief rant today, because I need to limit my computer time today. If you like this sort of yelling-at-clouds, or know somebody else who would, here are some buttons:
And if you want to yell at me about my regressive ideas, the comments will be open, but I can’t guarantee I’ll read them during normal business hours.