Three things in particular changed that practice:
- A shift from manufacturing to service industries (at least in developed economies). While production-line workers have to be physically present at one spot at more or less the same time, service workers are much less constrained. An insurance clerk, for example, can process claims at almost any hour of the day, and many creative types (in advertising, say, or graphic design) would claim to work better between the hours of 9pm and 5am than between 9am and 5pm. As services came to account for a larger and larger percentage of economic activity, so the opportunities to work more flexibly increased. This took pressure off the fabled urban rush-hour. Rush-hours did not disappear altogether, but they did become less intense and more extended.
- The growing number of women in the workforce forced employers to be more flexible. Women needed time off to collect children from school, to take family members for hospital visits, and to do all the other tasks that had been expected of them before they entered the workforce in bulk. They did not expect to work fewer hours than men; they merely expected them to be less rigidly predetermined. They also wanted to take longer periods of leave—to have their children or to care for elderly relatives. If employers wanted to benefit from women’s skills (and the generally lower price of their labour), they would have to accommodate these requirements.
- While workers wanted more flexibility, technology enabled them to have it. The PC, cheaper telecommunications and broadband internet enabled the creation of near-virtual firms whose employees were flexible in both the time and the place that they worked. Some of them worked at home, but others worked out of the back of a van or the company car, keeping themselves in touch with their office via wireless internet access and mobile telecommunications. Another chunk of service workers—consultants and the like—spent much of their time in offices provided by their clients. A company as big as IBM can say that today only 60% of its employees actually work on company premises. The other 40% are elsewhere.
For some, this flexibility was a source of freedom, but for others it was, perversely, a burden. Several surveys found that flexible working could mean working all hours of the day. Afraid that their bosses would assume (as surprisingly many still do) that absence meant skiving, they felt under pressure to work ever harder and to overcompensate. What’s more, they feared that being out of sight meant they were out of mind when it was time to be considered for promotion.