From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Mikaela Cohen

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How to conduct layoffs in a hybrid environment

HR Brew talks with two workplace experts about the dos and don’ts of hybrid layoffs.

An actor in a Saturday Night Live sketch saying she hates her job and needs to quit.

What HR should know about the TikTok workplace trend ‘QuitTok’

“Like all good social media, it is exposing the things that we don’t often talk about or that are in the shadows of what happens in organizations,” Hannah Yardley, CHRO at software company Achievers, tells HR Brew.

Finger pressing a "Friday" labeled enter button

This employer is experimenting with eternal summer Fridays

“Soft Fridays [mean] that we are trusting each other to get our work done and log off when we can on Friday,” Alli Ray, Codeword’s chief of staff, tells HR Brew.

Two dots and an arrow connected by a curving line denoting HR strategy

HR Strategy

Kristen Parisi

The Chinese government has imposed travel restrictions for public employees as the country tries to limit potential foreign interference.

Most public employees, including teachers and nurses, are not allowed to travel abroad without express permission from officials, the New York Times 

 on Aug. 3. The government told workers that the rules are to protect national security and fight corruption, but it seems that it’s part of a larger strategy to reduce overall interaction with foreigners. Some workers have had to hand over their passports to the government and may not get them back until two years after retirement.

Additionally, some employees must alert their employer if they leave the city; business trips are largely prohibited, according to the Times.

New workers in China who previously studied abroad may not be eligible for public positions, and most provinces no longer recruit workers from foreign universities for the most highly coveted positions.

“Because of US-China relations, because of the competition, I think it’s fair to say that Chinese society in general has become more sensitive to foreign countries,” Dongshu Liu, a professor at City University of Hong Kong, told the Times.

It doesn’t stop there. Appliance manufacturer Gree Electric won’t hire people educated outside of China. “Among them are spies,” the company’s president, Dong Mingzhu, 

As China tries to maintain control of its talent, many of the country’s students seek opportunities outside their borders. The US has promised to “aggressively” revoke Chinese student visas since President Trump returned to office in January, over potential national security concerns. However, critics believe this isolationist approach could hurt US companies’ ability to hire top-tier talent.

“[President] Xi is pushing many of the best and the brightest to leave China,” Thomas E. Kellogg, executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Asian Law, 

 New York Times. “The US should be taking advantage of this historic brain drain, not shutting the door to many talented Chinese young people.”

China limits travel for public employees

Workers at all levels have handed over their passports to the government and must get approval before traveling overseas.

World of HR: China limits travel for public employees

Employee engagement strategies have long been a talking point for companies, but might be more useless than you think.

That’s because many companies are implementing strategies to gauge employee engagement in the wrong way, according to Mark C. Crowley, author of 

The Power of Employee Well-Being: Move Beyond Engagement to Build Flourishing Teams

, which will be published in late September. In his book, Crowley suggests how HR teams can reframe their attention to improving employee well-being instead.

“It’s time to stop talking about engagement,” Crowley told HR Brew. “Like nobody’s calling it out, and we still go through the exercise of focusing on engagement, talking about engagement, and there’s just no reason to continue to do that.”

Crowley shared more insights from his book in an interview with HR Brew.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will HR pros learn after reading your book?

Measuring engagement has always been really super complicated, because there’s 

 has always asked. So, if you get bad scores, you have to isolate one of 12 different things. So, you could say, “Well, we don’t know whether people feel that they have a friend at work, or we don’t know whether people feel that they have clarity on what the job expectations are. We don’t know that people feel valued.” So, it’s Whac-a-Mole…[Engagement] simply boils down to how people feel at work, and you don’t have to ask them 12 different questions.

You just have to ask them, “How do you feel at work this week?” And, you can ask them some specific questions, like how do you feel about your benefits, or do you feel that you work for a manager who cares about you and supports your growth? You could ask those narrow questions in pulse surveys, and you can get that feedback immediately.

Why are employee engagement strategies not working?

No one’s ever taken it sincerely. Wall Street never took it sincerely. CEOs never took it sincerely. It’s always been a check-the-box activity. You do surveys once or twice a year. By the time the feedback gets out, it’s stale. 

Employees feel that it’s insincere, so they think engagement is a joke. And on top of that, no one’s ever been held accountable for it ever. So, most managers just think, “Oh, this is just an HR activity.” So, if you’ve got a toxic manager, or somebody’s not caring about their people and supporting them and doing the things that we know are highly effective for…[representing] highly effective leaders, then what you end up with is…an act of disrespect.

You’re asking people, “Tell me how we can make things better,” and then you never do anything with the feedback, and people end up really resenting that. So with pulse surveys, you can ask people specifically, “How do you feel?” And, then management can get together and say, “Hey, is this just a rough period right now, or do we need to make some adjustments?” Because the evidence is clear that how people feel at work drives their, no pun intended, their engagement, their commitment, their loyalty, their productivity, and it’s just this enormous win-win for organizations.

When we’ve always focused on engagement, that’s only something that companies cared about. Like, I’m an employee of a company, and they’re like, “We’re trying to elevate engagement.” It’s like, “I don’t care. There’s no win for me in that.” Whereas, if you’re focusing on well-being, you’re going to have people who are thriving, and we know that when people are thriving, organizations thrive at the same time.

Should HR pros avoid using the term employee engagement and focus on terms like well-being, productivity, etc.?

To be fair to some organizations that have really taken this seriously, I’m not criticizing that. I think that’s fine. If you have high engagement in your organization and you’ve committed to it, people validate it. In other words, employees say, “This is a really great place for me to work,” nobody should be changing. I’m not advocating for that.

A lot of times what organizations do is that they blend the four and the five scores. So, for example…on a scale of one to five, how caring and supportive is your manager to you personally? 

Well, there’s a big difference between a four and a five. If you give it a five, it’s like you’ve got a fantastic manager who genuinely cares about you. If you give it a four, you have some hesitation. There’s something missing there. It’s not a perfect score, but what happens is: a lot of cases that managers or companies that are putting these surveys together, they’ll take the fours and the fives and they’ll go, “Wow. 90% of our people are engaged.” That’s not really the case.

We know that well-being is something that’s really important to employees, whereas engagement has never been important to them. There’s no reason for them to be concerned about engagement. So, if you have something that is proven to have a direct correlation to organizational success, i.e. employee well-being, why wouldn’t you just focus on that? It’s simpler, and it’s a win-win for people.

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

An interview with Mark C. Crowley, author of ‘The Power of Employee Well-Being’

“If you’re focusing on well-being, you’re going to have people who are thriving, and we know that when people are thriving, organizations thrive at the same time.”

Why HR should ditch employee engagement strategies

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

The recent deadly shooting at an office building in midtown Manhattan was a grim reminder for HR leaders that even in heavily secured workplaces, employees may still be vulnerable to violence.

 by security guards and required employees to scan their badges to enter, a gunman was still able to enter with an assault rifle and kill four people on July 28. Shane Tamura, 27, who had driven from Las Vegas, shot an off-duty police officer, a security guard, and Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust’s CEO before making his way to the elevator and going up to the 33rd floor. He then shot and killed an associate with the real estate firm Rudin Management.

Security consultants told HR Brew they’re receiving calls from employers expressing concerns about avoiding a tragedy like the one that occurred at the Park Avenue building, which houses offices for companies including KPMG, Blackstone, and the National Football League (NFL). The shooter claimed to suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease caused by repeated head injuries, and targeted the NFL.

An evolving approach to workplace safety. 

Given the prevalence of active shooter incidents that occur in workplaces, some employers 

 in training to prepare staff to respond to violent incidents like this in recent years.

In addition to preparedness, HR teams are thinking about physical security as well. They may coordinate with teams including legal, facilities management, and environmental health and safety, according to Fred Burton, a former police officer and special agent who’s currently executive director of protective intelligence at Ontic, a security management software company.

One common approach Burton said he sees big companies take is forming a working group that meets regularly to discuss potential security threats. HR might flag a former employee, for example, who could present a potential risk for the company (likely in a case of retaliation). “It’s very important that corporate America today coordinates on incidents, and makes sure that everybody’s in the loop as to what kind of problems are persistent,” he said.

Balancing security risks with budget concerns. 

When making the case for these types of investments, HR leaders may have to balance security with budgetary concerns. Security can be costly, and it’s not a revenue generator. Hiring an armed former or off-duty police officer to work in an office lobby could cost upwards of $200 an hour, security executives 

High-profile incidents like the one that occurred on Park Avenue, though, may convince corporate leaders that such investments are worth it. The killing of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December, which occurred just blocks from the Park Avenue office, was a “wake-up call” for corporate America, Burton said. In the aftermath of his death, many companies 

The July 28 shooting seems likely to prompt increased interest in additional measures that could prevent an armed shooter from entering a building and accessing spaces where employees are working, as Tamura did.

John Torres, president of security and technology consulting with Guidepost Solutions, said he’d recently met with companies inquiring about gun-detection systems. Such software monitors security camera footage to alert building management and the police department when an individual walks in with a gun.

As employers’ workplace safety policies evolve, perhaps the toughest takeaway is realizing no one measure is sure to prevent tragedies from occurring. Tamura entered a building with heavy security, in a state with 

, and still took the lives of four people.

“People that want to create this type of harm will find a way to get towards the path of least resistance,” Burton said. “As security evolves, the threats evolve.”

NYC police officer following the shooting

After deadly Manhattan shooting, HR wonders what more it can do

Security consultants said they’re receiving inquiries from employers concerned about preventing a deadly shooting like the one that occurred in midtown Manhattan.

Following Manhattan shooting, employers wonder what more they can do

What would the world look like if employees introduced themselves not by job titles but by their skills inventory?

While it isn’t realistic to introduce yourself in everyday conversations with, “Hi, my name is Stacey. I write code in Python. I design products. I’ve worked in software engineering for 10 years,” one author suggests HR pros think of their employees as these skills instead of just, “Stacey, the director of product design.”

Craig Friedman, a talent and skills transformation leader for the Illinois-based St. Charles Consulting Group, highlights the importance of companies becoming a skills-based organization in his new book 

Enterprise Skills Unlocked: A Blueprint for Building Skills-based Talent Management

Friedman shared with HR Brew what people leaders will learn from his book.

What does a skills-based organization look like?

Skills [are] largely about data…and that’s one of the misconceptions around it…If we had skills not just tied to learning courses and on people’s profiles, but they were tied to everyone’s job descriptions, and especially tied to the work tasks, whether that’s in a workflow, or in a staffing assignment, or job posting…we can actually leverage a whole bunch of more adaptable, more efficient, more tailored talent strategies across the whole value chain.

We can create more personalized learning pathways, so we get [a] broader reach of learning, development, of leadership development, more flexible work design, more career mobility options for employees, [a] deeper reach for recruiting, more strategic workforce planning.

What’s an example of how HR can focus on skills for roles and projects?

One way that consulting companies are leveraging these concepts is through talent marketplaces. The core of a consulting business is getting people staffed on projects that are billable, and when people are not on projects, they’re essentially like inventory in a warehouse accumulating, carrying charges…So, anything you can do to get the right people staffed on the right projects more efficiently leads directly to revenue capture.

If they’re using a talent marketplace where they’re posting open staffing assignments, the machine learning in the talent marketplaces can scan across all of the employee profiles, find people who are the best matches. And, even if they’re not a 100% match, say you’ve got someone whose skills profile is a 90% match, the system can automatically tee up the project onboarding for that 10%. No extra effort on anyone’s part. No one has to create a project onboarding plan.

How can HR help their organization adopt a skills-first mindset?

You can make a lot of progress building in the long term a skills-based organization or skills-based enterprise one meaningful project at a time, and one of the best ways that I’ve seen companies do it is by finding a business issue that is tied to skills.

I had a client that worked in the mining industry. The market was changing in such a way that they needed to dramatically expand their copper mining business, and in order to expand their copper mining business, it so turns out that most of the copper that they’re mining today is near the surface of the earth. If they want to dramatically increase it, they need to dig deeper into the earth to get some more copper.

But underground mining is a completely different set of engineering practices than surface mining, so they have to develop a whole lot of new underground mining skills in order to expand their business. With the help of a skills-based organization, they can much more effectively find the talent that they need, define the skills that they need through a variety of different strategies. 

They might do skills-based recruiting to get it from the marketplace…They might move people around internally, the build, buy, repatch, borrow strategy to try to meet that capability need and get to market quickly.

What role does AI play in skills-based organizations?

For most of the last 40 years, our HR systems have been all based at the employee level. We hire employees. We give them a job title. We give them a salary and benefits, and an email address and a phone number. Slot them into a job. Everything that HR does is focused at the headcount level.

Skills-based [strategies] takes that down a level of detail, and in taking it down a level of detail, it’s both more granular, but it’s also more informative. Because skills tell us not just that we have a person, but what that person can do, what work they can accomplish. So, it moves the whole exercise of talent management from being a headcount management exercise to being a capability development exercise.

An interview with Craig Friedman, author of ‘Enterprise Skills Unlocked’

“Skills tell us not just that we have a person, but what that person can do, what work they can accomplish.”

HR should stop thinking of employees in headcount—consider them as a collection of skills

Employees want work-life balance, but it might be a fool’s errand.

A majority of employees (83%) view work-life balance as the top motivator for staying with their current job or finding a new one, according to 

 from staffing agency Randstad earlier this year. It’s the first time employees reported work-life balance as a bigger job motivator than compensation in the 22 years since the report was first published.

But some workplace experts caution HR pros against pushing work-life balance too strongly on employees because that balance might be impossible to achieve. Shark Tank entrepreneur and business leader Barbara Corcoran, for instance, 

Work-life balance emerged in the ‘70s and ‘80s as employees sought both professional and personal success, especially women who wanted careers without sacrificing personal goals like starting a family. Work-life balance then gained traction into the 21st century as more employers offered maternity leave and wellness benefits, and established norms around a 40-hour workweek.

But, since the pandemic, the lines between work and life have blurred, said Jennifer Moss, workplace strategist and author of 

, and employees now have “a persistent, constant inability to bifurcate” the two.

While Covid-19 prompted more flexibility in the workplace, Moss told HR Brew there’s also been a corrosion in how employees view their work and personal lives.

“We’re finding this increase in…pajama hours, where people can’t get work done in the day, and so they look at this as this ‘fun’ work in the evening,” she said. “When we think about that as harmonious, then it’s dangerous because we’re not actually doing fun work. We’re still working.”

Before the pandemic, and especially now with return-to-office mandates, Moss said there are more “unrealized hours” lost to the workplace. From commuting, taking kids to and from childcare, waking up earlier, and getting ready in the morning, she said it takes time away from living.

Work-life balance might not be working because many employees see their personal and professional lives as a “contrast” or in “competition” with one another, Moss said. She recommends instead focusing on work-life harmony.

“Harmony, which means that both things are working in a way that is healthy, and fluid, and supporting each other and with an approach to well-being,” she said. “When I see people that really have that healthy harmony between work and life, they’re so high performing…They don’t feel like one is stealing from the other.”

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist, author, and Glassdoor’s chief worklife expert, agrees with Moss that there’s a need for a harmonious relationship between work and life. He suggests HR pros learn the differences and benefits between work-life integration and segmentation.

Work-life integration, Grant told HR Brew, is often demonstrated by employees who don’t mind work being a larger part of their lives. “They tend to have pictures of their kids at their desk. They talk about their work at home. They invite their colleagues over for dinner,” he said. “Segmenters want none of that.”

Employees who want work-life segmentation value strict boundaries, reserve relationships and emotions for outside of work, and tend to be more task-focused while at work, he said. By contrast, segmenters are typically more satisfied with their jobs, report higher well-being, feel less stressed, and are less likely to burnout, Grant said.

While there are benefits to work-life integration, like happy hour with coworkers and work friendships, Grant said most US companies lean too far into work-life integration, so HR could help promote more segmentation.

“If we moved a little bit more in the segmentation direction and said, ‘Yeah, harmony is maybe a better way to talk about it because what that signals to me is my job is not going to interfere with my family, my friends, my health or my hobbies,’” he explained.

Another way HR pros can promote harmony, Grant said, is by offering benefits that align with both work-life integration and segmentation, so segmenters can still thrive in a more integrated workplace and vice versa. For instance, he said if your company has an on-site gym for employees, they could offer stipends for off-site gym memberships, too.

“When we use the term harmony,” Moss said, “It’s about not just integrating both [work and life], but actually striving for something better.”

Animated gif of a laptop showing a notification and a woman relaxing on a chair, both on a balancing beam.

Work-life balance isn’t working. Here’s what HR needs to know

HR can stop pushing balance and instead help employees form a harmonious relationship with work.

With the rise of the creator economy, being an Internet influencer has become a much-coveted job for many Gen-Z workers.

It can be tricky to land a full-time job as an influencer, but some aspiring creators are using their day jobs as fodder for content. This is particularly true of employees working for popular food chains, who are eager to share insider tips like making the perfect Cold Stone concoction or a Crunchwrap Supreme that hits just like Taco Bell’s.

The Chicago-area-based Portillo’s food chain is dipping its toe in the employee influencer space with an “internal influencer program,” Chief People Officer Jill Waite recently told HR Brew. By elevating the voices of Portillo’s employees on social media, the company hopes to showcase its brand in a more authentic way, as well as tap into a younger talent pool for recruitment and retention efforts, she said.

How Portillo’s’s influencer program works. 

Waite’s team got the idea for an employee influencer program after noticing its employees would often share content about their jobs and the brand on the company’s internal communications platform, Portillo’s Connect, which functions somewhat like an internal Instagram.

Portillo’s, which is known for Chicago specialties like hot dogs and Italian beef sandwiches, employs between 8,000 and 9,000 workers depending on the season. It’s also in the midst of a significant expansion, with plans to open hundreds of new restaurants in the coming years, in locations like Arizona, Florida, and Texas.

Given the chain is “going into new markets where guests and team members may not know who we are,” Waite and her colleagues thought it would be beneficial to have “internal influencers who know our brand, love our brand, and can tell our story,” she said. The thinking behind the program was that “our team members could tell the story better than we could.”

In partnership with the marketing and PR departments, Waite’s team selected 15 employees from across the Portillo’s organization to participate in the internal influencer program.

The group is dubbed “Maxwell Street Mavens,” a nod to the chain’s Polish sausage, and has helped develop content for campaigns such as the restaurant’s “buy one, get one free” special, and a new loyalty program called Portillo’s Perks. In 

 that Portillo’s recently featured on its LinkedIn page, a Portillo’s general manager participating in the program shared a behind-the-scenes video showing how the chain’s famed Italian beef sandwich is made.

While the program is still very much in its early days, Waite said eventually she’d like to have an internal influencer working at every Portillo’s location.

In recent years, employers in the food service industry have had to contend 

 of the “employee social ambassador,” with some embracing the role and others shying away from it. Last year, a Chick-fil-A employee was asked to stop posting reviews of the company’s menu items on her personal TikTok account. Seeing an opportunity where its competitor saw a risk, Shake Shack reached out to the employee and offered her a deal to make two paid, branded videos for the company.

Programs like this one from Portillo’s seem to recognize workers are interested in building a personal brand around their work, while still seeking to control the narrative around the corporate brand. Waite’s team gives internal influencers guidelines for posting about certain topics, and works with legal and operations to ensure their posts are accurate and represent the company’s values. While she recognized situations may occur when a worker posts something that doesn’t align with the parameters her team sets, she said she believed such occurrences would be rare.

“If you put too many guardrails around, then you take away the authenticity of it, and you take away the creativity,” Waite said.

The San Francisco-based Autodesk, a software company that sources heavily from employee stories for its branding efforts, leans on a “very clear social media policy” to help workers understand how best to represent their employer online, according to Kassidi Sorensen, senior global employer brand creative and marketing manager. Sorensen’s team tries to make “it very clear what they can’t do”—such as share proprietary information online—“but [inspire] them with what they can do.”

“If people don’t know what they can’t do, what I’ve encountered in this space is they’ll err on the side of caution and not share at all,” Sorensen observed.

As more companies look to outsource content creation to employees outside of their marketing and communications teams, they’re still ironing out details—chief among them how workers should be compensated, if at all, for the additional work they’re taking on.

“I think there’s some danger in a true pay-for-play kind of activity, because you start wondering about people’s motivations for doing the work,” Allison Vaillancourt said, a VP at the HR consulting firm Segal who advises employers on how to motivate and retain employees.

Autodesk employees can earn rewards points for sharing their stories, which they can then redeem on the company’s recognition platform, Sorensen told HR Brew. Waite described the Portillo’s internal influencer role as something that could be incorporated into a paid hourly job, so long as general managers can help workers find time to shoot content while they’re on the clock in a way that doesn’t interfere with food safety or guest experience.

Another question for HR leaders running employee brand ambassador programs, Vaillaincourt added, is how to measure their success in furthering “corporate goals."

There’s both a business and an HR component to what’s driving the Portillo’s internal influencer program. By sharing worker-driven stories that demonstrate what makes the chain’s food “excessively delicious,” Waite said she and her colleagues hope to “drive sales and transactions” for the brand.

But perhaps even more valuable for the HR department is the possibility of connecting with potential Portillo’s job-seekers. College graduates are highly attuned to companies’ online presence and reputation, according to 

 from the job platform Handshake, with 73% reporting they’d be more likely to apply for a job after seeing “behind-the-scenes content from an employer.”

Waite noted that Portillo’s employs many college students that come back to work during the summer and holiday seasons. She’s focused not only on reaching many of the 18-to 22-year-olds that currently hold Portillo’s jobs, but also younger talent who may want to apply for those jobs in the next few years.

“If we don’t understand them now and how to reach them, it’s too late by the time they hit the workforce,” she said. “Understanding who’s coming up and what really resonates with them is important for us to win the battle of talent.”

A recently opened Portillo's location in Mansfield, Texas.

Portillo’s launches employee influencer program  

The food chain recently launched an “internal influencer” program to source social media content from workers in its stores.

Why Portillo’s is outsourcing some social media efforts to its store workers

Has the traditional workday gone the way of the Edsel?

For many employees, the workday stretches beyond a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday schedule, according to a Microsoft 

 from last month, as the average employee gets 50 work messages outside of business hours. That’s on top of 29% of employees checking their emails after 10:00pm and 20% of employees reading emails on Saturday and Sunday.

Working off-hours is nothing new for many corporate roles, according to Kim Seals, senior partner at consulting firm West Monroe, especially in industries like sales, accounting, or consulting where employees are often “rewarded” for working off-hours, she said.

But what’s evident in Microsoft’s findings, Seals told HR Brew, is that working off-hours has seeped into roles where it may not be required or rewarded to work late nights or early mornings.

“What Covid did was really just normalize [working off-hours] for other jobs where that was not always the case,” she said. “When we went to these hybrid jobs or remote-first jobs, then the trade-off that folks expected was, ‘Look, if you’re at home and you have more flexibility, then you don’t need to be tied to a core set of working hours.’”

Working outside normal hours can also be fueled by return-to-office mandates and fear from employees to appear more productive, Seals said.

“[It’s a] concern that I have to be visible online for people to see that I am working, and I am productive,” she said. “Did that drive some folks to say, ‘Let me show them that I’m still willing to work different hours, so that I don’t lose my privilege, if you will, to work from home or to work remotely?’”

Other employees might be working off-hours, Seals said, because they’re overwhelmed with meetings and in-person interactions in the office to complete tasks and working in the office means more time is spent commuting.

“If you put all that together, the commute, the caregiving, the meetings during the core working hours…the only time I have quiet time to actually answer emails and do the work is after dinner,” she said. “After all the other obligations are dealt with, now I have time to actually do my job.”

People leaders can use screen time monitoring tools, Seals said, in the same way that people use screen time monitoring on their phones to track how long they’ve spent on certain apps or social media. If HR notices employees spending consecutive late nights or early mornings working, she said, then there’s an opportunity for them or their managers to flag it and have a check-in conversation.

“We need to use the tech tools to flag for people leaders like, ‘Hey, Kim has been online four out of five nights this week. She’s been working eight to midnight in addition to her regular work schedule,” Seals said. “Give [their] manager some talking points to come to [them] and say, ‘Hey, Kim, I’ve noticed a lot of long nights like, what can we be doing? Can I help you prioritize? How can I help you set healthy boundaries?’”

HR pros should be aware that working off-hours is primarily a concern when it’s in addition to the eight-hour workday, Seals said, but if employees are taking time during the workday to pick up kids from school or take a parent to a doctor’s appointment, then working late hours might be the time to catch up.

“When you have that balance, and it’s not a true infinite workday where I don’t ever switch off, it’s not always a bad thing,” she said. “To give workers flexibility to say, ‘We’re not just going to tie you to a core set of hours of nine to five’...That way it benefits both parties.”