The art of the flexible

Kate Hesson juggles work and family.

• Flexibility is all very well 

It's 1.30pm on Monday and Marie Callander has just arrived back at work after an hour and a-half away. Her granddaughter, Evie, has been airlifted to Starship Hospital with breathing problems.

Callander, a 51-year-old solicitor, already has a flexible work arrangement that allows her to take care of Evie on Wednesday afternoons. Today, she has been able to drop everything and spend time with the 6-month-old before she is flown to Auckland.

Down the hall, fellow solicitor Kate Hesson has only two more hours left at work. Mother to a toddler, she leaves at 3.30pm most days and does not come to work at all on Fridays.

While people like Marie Callander have long juggled job and family commitments, those working flexible hours are no longer the exception.

New research from the Families Commission shows more than three-quarters of those surveyed for the study, Give and Take - Families' perceptions and experiences of flexible work in New Zealand, had access to or used flexible work arrangements.

Of those who reported having a lot of flexibility, nearly 80% said they were satisfied with their work-life balance. In contrast, only 52% of those with little or no flexibility were satisfied with theirs.

The report's release came three months after the passage of legislation giving employees with care responsibilities the right to request flexible work arrangements.

And the practice is likely to increase as more people engage in further education, more women take up paid work, skill shortages grow and the population ages.

Flexible work can include the ability to vary start times, finish times or lunch breaks; work from home, take time off for school holidays or special events, and make up work time later or in advance.

Other options include swapping shifts with colleagues, taking children to work when necessary, buying additional leave, taking career breaks and gradually moving into retirement.

Some people also include part-time work or a later, but fixed, starting time in the definition, although the Commission says those arrangements can actually be quite rigid.

Reported benefits for employers include increased staff morale, the ability to attract staff who might otherwise have been unable to work, and higher staff retention, resulting in savings on recruitment and retraining costs.

In some places, it allows for commuting outside of peak rush hours. Flexible work also enhances family life.

The New Zealand study found it increased opportunities for families to spend quality time together, enabled them to meet their care responsibilities while maintaining their participation in the paid workforce, and reduced stress.

For some this simply meant knowing what their children were doing, being able to drop them at school or accompany them on class trips, being able to take holidays together, or take advantage of limited time left with elderly relatives.

But some argue that flexible work is still seen as mainly the domain of working mothers. They claim there is still pressure on men to work full-time and that a male who asks for reduced hours may not be seen as committed to his job.

Others say that everyone has a life outside work - not just parents - and the right to request flexible hours should be extended to all.

One woman writing in an online community for women executives, complained that colleagues with children started their work days later, thanks to flex-time, but ruined her evenings because they emailed her late at night and expected responses.

She asked how "non-parents" could assert their right to work-life balance, too. For some families in the New Zealand study, flexible arrangements came at a cost. They talked of the spill-over of work into home life, and a constant feeling of juggling work and family responsibilities.

Others felt they had experienced slower career progression and had to trade off flexibility for job quality, pay and status.

Kate Hesson - who, like Callander, works for Anderson Lloyd Lawyers in Dunedin - says she constantly feels she is not doing justice to anything. The key, she finds, is to prioritise where her efforts need to go and not try to be a perfectionist about the rest.

• Flexibility is even more important for Hesson than most, as her husband Mike - Otago and New Zealand A cricket coach - is sometimes out of town or out of the country for weeks on end.

If she worked full-time, there would be periods when 20-month-old Holly would see little of either parent. So for now, she is not seeking promotion and works from the office 25 hours a week while Holly is cared for by her grandmother and a home-based service.