# The psychology of flexible work

- **Episode:** [156](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/156.md) (2024-12-24)
- **Type:** other
- **Tags:** flexible-work, psychology, remote-work
- **Time:** 3:00–6:57 (start 180s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/156?t=180](https://truthliesandwork.com/156?t=180)

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[3:00] Leanne Elliott: I'm very, very interested in the psychology of flexible work. Oh, because it strikes me as one of those cases where, um, uh, you know, we're potentially throwing a huge increase, a huge potentially beneficial change in the value exchange between employer and employee. And we're potentially throwing it away if we're not intelligent about it
[3:29] Al Elliott: Why are we throwing it away?
[3:32] Leanne Elliott: Because of general sort of Luddism. I mean, the fortunate thing about flexible work is that employers have at least noticed In most jobs, nobody gives that much thought to productivity except in a very narrow way. And, you know, one of the things that interests me is there's quite a lot of evidence that open-plan offices are bad for productivity. There's a lot of evidence that one of the single best things you can do for productivity is giving people multiple monitors, which again makes let's say hot desking much more difficult. You know, if you want to have multiple monitors, you know, you need a constant place generally. Not essential. But what always interests me is when you do have evidence in productivity, businesses don't really act on it very much. But there's a wider question here, by the way, which is that there's the short-term effects of flexible working, which may be Maybe net negative to a, to a small degree. Then there are the long-term effects, which are almost certainly extremely positive. I don't mean, by the way, fully remote working. I think in certain conditions that works, but I don't think fully remote working for everybody, even in office jobs. Obviously, there are probably 50% of jobs can't be done remotely at all. But in the case of, for example, the question I occasionally ask our clients is, do you want your employees to work remotely? To which the answer might be no. I mean, the more enlightened ones would say yes. But the answer is quite often no. And then I ask a separate question, which is, do you want your customers to be able to work remotely? To which the answer has to be your consumers, because the answer there almost certainly has to be yes, because it increases people's disposable income. And it's worth noting that the interests of the employer and the shareholder are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the employee. There's nothing revolutionary about that assertion, but they're also not necessarily well aligned with the interests of the economy as a whole. So if you have a situation where people have to commute less frequently and indeed can live further away from their place of work and save money, The net effect of that is to take money from the unproductive economy, which is broadly speaking involuntary expenditure, okay, and redirect it into the voluntary economy. In other words, the productive economy. It also helps things like the leveling up agenda. I think one of the other things is you've got to be very sure you're measuring productivity broadly, not just in any given day. Is someone working from home more productive or less productive than someone working in an office? You also have to look at questions like sickness, maternity, you know, for example, compassionate leave or time people have to take off in order to, let's say, act as carers. Now, one of the interesting things there would be, I think it's— I think I'm right in saying this, but there's a very significant reduction in sickness time caused by allowing people to work flexibly
[6:57] Al Elliott: Yeah