In an always-on culture, employees try ‘microshifting’ to reclaim personal lives

(AP Illustration / Peter Hamlin)

NEW YORK — Before the house is humming and her teenagers ask her to whip up breakfast or chauffeur them to school, Jen Meegan reads her company emails and revisits ideas she drafted the night before.

She works for an hour or so, then after the school run shops for groceries or gets gas before returning to focus deeply on her job as head writer and cofounder of Sheer Havoc, a creative services agency.

And so goes the rhythm of her day: working in targeted chunks for a few hours, breaking for an hour or two to tend to family and personal needs, and repeating the pattern until she finishes her work late at night.

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Meegan is among the wage earners engaging in “microshifting,” a flexible scheduling approach that involves tackling job duties in short, productive bursts instead of a single nine-to-five stretch. The paid labour fits around and between non-work responsibilities and priorities. Performance is judged primarily by output, with less emphasis on the number of hours logged behind a screen.

“Sometimes the break’s when most of the work will get done in your head, because you’re not sitting in front of a laptop just staring at a screen going, ‘I can’t come up with anything,’” Meegan said.

The practice is growing in popularity among workers and gaining acceptance in some organizations as a way to improve work-life balance. The remote and hybrid arrangements that came out of the coronavirus pandemic left some people aching for time to care for others or themselves once return-to-office mandates were issued.

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“As more managers and more organizations get better adept at giving a little bit of autonomy, this is becoming not only a little more popular, but it also gives employees the motivation and almost the license to ask for this,” Kevin Rockmann, a professor of management at George Mason University’s Costello College of Business.

Here’s what some workers, managers and experts have to say about the pros and cons of microshifting.

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Boosting creativity and productivity

While some independent contractors say they’ve been microshifting for years, the term is catching on among people holding down jobs that traditionally require set, contiguous hours. Some companies offer such flexibility or acknowledge they have employees working this way even if the method isn’t explicitly condoned.

Proponents argue that working in increments boosts productivity by giving the brain breaks. Taking walks or attending a child’s school function can be reinvigorating for people who get drained from sitting at a desk or looking at a computer screen, supporters say.

“From a creativity standpoint, it’s good to take breaks,” Rockmann said. “When you stop thinking about a task is when your best ideas come to you.”

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When Shellie Garrett led an eight-person team as director of investigations and appeals at Oklahoma Community Cares Partners, an entity created to check the veracity of rental assistance claims during the pandemic, she allowed the people she managed to set their own schedules, aside from weekly team meetings.

“Everybody needed to maintain availability for emergency questions or issues. But I let people determine what worked best for them productivity-wise,” Garrett said. “If productivity was lapsing, we had to figure out different solutions. But overall, I feel like giving that autonomy led to better production and happier employees.”

While on the clock, her team members updated spreadsheets, cross-referenced documents or did investigative work. In their off-hours, one employee was nursing an infant and homeschooling a preschooler, and another worked a second job as a real estate agent.

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Impact on relationships

Amanda Elyse, who works as a full-time professor of legal writing at Seattle University School of Law and a part-time policy and programs lead at the Northwest Animal Rights Network, said microshifting allows her to have meals with her partner, who works nights, and to play with her dogs during the day.

“There’s just so many little things in the day that, when you’re in control of your schedule, you can take that time to do,” Elyse said.

While microshifting is often good for personal relationships, it can damage professional ones, Rockmann said.

Effective teams are committed to working together collaboratively, but “the whole idea of microshifting is taking care of yourself,” he said. “It’s not that taking care of yourself is bad. It places the emphasis on the individual, not the relationships.”

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Pranav Dalal, the founder and CEO of California-based remote staffing firm Office Beacon, manages employees in India, the Philippines, Mexico and South Africa. They work for American companies in areas such as customer service, finance and logistics. Dalal knows some employees are microshifting to take care of personal needs.

“It’s happening without a policy and without me saying it, and those are in positions where they’re more managerial positions,” he said. “I don’t really question it because I know that people are getting their work done at those levels.”

As a single father, Dalal says he understands. But there are times when people take it too far. When one team member routinely showed up late to in-person work events because they were tending to personal business, it created problems, so Dalal let that employee go.

“If someone really abuses that, it becomes destructive to the team because then resentment builds,” Dalal added. “As an employer, it definitely is a big shift for companies. And the shift is, essentially, can you deliver the same quality service, reliably, when there’s microshifting happening?”

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Helping manage health

Isabelle “Izzy” Young’s job as a political organizer in Texas is all-consuming but she can choose her own hours, for the most part, as long as she’s getting the job done.

The ability to self-schedule helps Young manage her autism and a chronic illness called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which can cause a rapid heart rate or dizziness when standing up. If she needs more sleep, she may set meetings for later in the day. If she needs to reset her nervous system, she can take an hour or two midday to call a friend or read a book before working into the evening.

“I am very lucky to have a principal that is a compassionate person,” Young said. “He’s acutely aware that life happens, and you can be incredibly productive and chronically ill.”

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One downside is she feels like she’s almost always working. “The job never ends, so you’re never really off the clock.”

Garrett, the team leader in Oklahoma, worked in two-hour blocks, which helped her manage the ups and downs of chronic conditions including an autoimmune disease and premenstrual dysphoric disorder, she said. She could have a burst of creativity and then take a nap or go to the gym.

“Microshifting was honestly a godsend,” Garrett said. “I don’t know if I could have done this job without being able to do that.”

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Making the ask

When asking an employer for the flexibility to set your own hours, tell them how they’re going to benefit, Garrett suggested.

“You have to go into the interview and sell it,” she said. “You have go in and say, ‘I’m willing to do whatever schedule and put my best foot forward, but if you want me to be most productive or most creative, this is how I work best, if this is something you’re willing to work with.’”

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Cathy Bussewitz, The Associated Press