Abstract
The ability to combine work with quality time together as a family is at the heart of the concept of work-life balance. Using previously unexploited data on couples’ work schedules we investigate the effect of flexible working on couples’ coordination of their daily work schedules in the UK. We consider three distinct dimensions of flexible working: flexibility of daily start and finish times (flexitime), flexibility of work times over the year (annualized hours), and generalized control of working hours. We show that having flexitime at work increases a couple’s amount of coordination of their daily work schedules by a half to 1 h, which is double the margin of adjustment enjoyed by couples with no flexitime. The impact is driven by couples with children. In contrast to flexitime, the other two forms of flexible working do not seem to increase synchronous time. Our results suggest that having flexitime plays an important role in relaxing the work scheduling constraints faced by families with young children, and that effective flexible working time arrangements are those that increase the worker’s and not the employer’s flexibility.
Highlights
The choice and convenience in hours of work is at the heart of work-life balance, which goes beyond the total time available for out-of-work activities and crucially rests on being able to coordinate time with others, for example in order to enjoy more leisure time together
We look at couple households in which both partners work full time (FT) or in which the male partner works full time and the female part time (PT)
This paper focuses on how work time arrangements relate directly to the synchronization of work schedules between the partners in a couple
Summary
The choice and convenience in hours of work is at the heart of work-life balance, which goes beyond the total time available for out-of-work activities and crucially rests on being able to coordinate time with others, for example in order to enjoy more leisure time together. Our results from estimating an equation of couples’ coordination of their work schedules augmented with flexibility suggest that flexitime is associated with a half to 1 h increase in daily synchronous work time This is a large figure given previous findings showing that the overall amount of synchronization is about an hour per day, irrespective of whether couples have flexitime or not (Hallberg 2003). A limited set of studies have modeled the individual choice to work or not at different times of the day (see for example Hamermesh 1999) This paper expands this growing literature by incorporating a household dimension to the timing of work in order to study the coordination of work schedules between spouses, and by providing a theoretical link to the availability of flexible work.
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