I came across this March 2022 post about having control over your day by @ChrisHannah, where they advocate for flexible working hours:
Personally, I think the best solution for people and companies (where the job allows), is if your entire working hours were flexible. For example, you could be contracted to work 8 hours a day, but you are free to fulfil those 8 hours between the hours of 7 am and 9 pm. Maybe one day you have plans later on in the day, so you choose to start at 7 am, and have a short lunch. But another day, you want to go have brunch with friends, so you could start later, or perhaps you just take a long break?
My employer has had for many years exactly such a model: we are expected to be “online”—that is, generally available and working, not necessarily actually logged into Teams—from 9am–3pm Monday–Friday, and we are expected to log 80 hours every two weeks (we’re a research consultancy, so we take both “log” and “80 hours” both seriously and literally). We’re also expected to “work from site” Tuesday–Thursday, with Mondays and Fridays being optional work-from-home days. Beyond those constraints, we’re free to flex our schedule in the way that lets us do our best work.
As a manager, I often field questions about why our policies are not even more flexible, and even I think of us as stuck in the past in many ways. So I appreciated seeing a proposal for improvement that we have already engaged, suggesting that perhaps things are not always better everywhere else.
