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FLEX YOUR WORK

I was a director at a global research agency. Six months earlier I’d given birth to my second daughter. I had come back to work after maternity leave and negotiated a part-time, three-day-a-week contract. I’d achieved the holy grail: flexibility. I could look after my baby and three-year-old whilst holding down the job I loved. I should have been triumphant, clicking my heels together as I trotted off into the sunset, swinging a laptop case in one hand and a nappy bag in the other, the clichéd stock image of a working woman.

But, no. It was a disaster. It was one of the most pressurized and stressful periods of my life, peppered with moments when I felt I was failing. Here are some examples:

~ When I left work bang on time and felt my colleagues’ raised eyebrows and disapproval haunt me as I galloped to the Tube station.

~ When I arrived sweating, frazzled and tense to take over from the nanny for the battleground of a toddler bathtime.

~ When I sat on the loo seat and mindlessly chugged a ten-minute Instagram fix.

~ When I worked more, unpaid, than my three allotted days, answering emails on days off and writing reports after I put my daughter to bed.

~ When I frantically tapped out a work email at the edge of the sandpit, whilst my daughter got into fist-fights over buckets and spades.

I remember a poignant news story during this period. The number of playground accidents was apparently on the rise. Kids were falling off climbing frames, being flattened by swings and jettisoned from seesaws. I linked it with the hordes of distracted mums like me, squinting over iPhones on benches at the edges of the playground, trying to reply to incessant requests from colleagues on their days off. My failed flexibility would land my kid in hospital, I was sure of it.

And even if it didn’t, I still felt guilty that those precious two days with my daughter were so un-fun. I was un-fun. I was exhausted, constantly multi-tasking, never focused on the present, mind swivelling to the next task. I was like one of those terrible people at parties who keep looking over your shoulder in case there’s a sexier guest – except I was doing that to my own daughter. And the sexy guest was a boring email about a work meeting. And yet all the time, throughout this period, I felt grateful. Grateful to my bosses for giving me the chance to feel like I was failing in every respect.

I know. Get the violins out. All of this constitutes a ‘First-World problem’. Things were largely OK, and I’m sure my story is no different to any other working parent’s. But clearly, flexibility, as I had it, was a shitshow.

I wanted to understand why it was such a fiasco when I tried to flex my working hours around parenthood. And why are we all so wedded to the nine-to-five, five days a week?

I found, as I will show in this chapter, that it’s not enough to simply convince your employers to agree to flexibility, as I had done. This is just the beginning. The flexible arrangement actually needs to work, too. And that requires new ways of thinking from both the employer and the employee.

This chapter will look at our modern relationship with time and understand why the nine-to-five (or longer) has become the norm. I will explain what is currently broken within work culture today – the pressures and rigidity that are making people ill, sad and overwhelmed. I will examine the concept of flexible working that seeks to address work and life, without feeling that we are failing at both. And I will give tips on how to achieve flexible working that works, for everyone. The story begins – let’s face it, it often does – in sixteenth-century Italy.