Later this week, I facilitate a session at the FWI/SHRM Work-Life Focus: 2012 and Beyond Conference entitled “HR and the Business: Strategic, Co-Owners of Flexibility.”

My goal is to help each participant answer the question, “What role does/should HR play in making flexibility in the way work is done part of the culture and business strategy of an organization?”

But I’d also like to know what you think, so please take a minute to answer the question below (once you’ve made your choice, scroll down to enter):

Please forward this post and survey to anyone you might think would want to weigh in and answer the question. This is an important and often confusing issue inside organizations, so the more votes…the better!

I will report the results of this survey and the outcomes from my session in a blog post after the conference. Follow Twitter hashtags #workflex11 and #SHRM for conference updates which begin Tuesday 11/8 and ends Thursday 11/10.

And if you are in DC at the conference be sure to find me a say “hi.” Thank you!

(This article appears in the October, 2011 issue of Talent Management Magazine and was co-authored with one of my Flex+Strategy Group partners, Donna Miller)

As the dust settles from the Great Recession and a new economic reality emerges, businesses are beginning to take a hard look at how they can manage their talent for maximum business impact. The urgency to review and rethink is driven by leaner headcounts, larger workloads and greater stress as technology and globalization.  These trends erased the traditional lines between work and life. The result is a shift in expectations about how to manage responsibilities on and off the job. Businesses are moving beyond the traditional one-size-fits-all model of work and career and taking a more strategic, flexible approach.

Since 2007, Work+Life Fit Inc. and Opinion Research Corp. have conducted a biennial national study to track the state of work-life flexibility from the employees’ perspective. The results of the 2011 Work+Life Fit Reality Check study confirm that new, flexible ways of working have gained traction since 2007. However, organizations need to do more. Helping employees manage the way work fits into their lives and organizations’ profits and growth plans in a transformed economy will require making flexibility — informal and formal telework, flexible hours, reduced schedules and compressed work weeks — an integral part of the operating business model and culture.

Traditionally, that meant writing a policy or training managers. But strategic flexibility requires dedicating people, time and money to a coordinated culture change process — one that clearly defines a business’ unique rationale for greater flexibility, establishes a shared vision of how managers and employees will use it and executes with relentless communication.

(Click here for more)

As I contemplated what to write about in my post for National Work and Family Month, an interesting piece of research crossed my desk entitled, “Are Family-Friendly Workplace Practices a Valuable Firm Resource?”

What caught my attention was the ironic disconnect between what the study intended to conclude and what the findings actually proved (and the authors missed):

• Intended Conclusion: “Family-Friendly” work practices (FFWPs) are not valuable to organizations;
• Actual Unintended Conclusion: “Family-Friendly” workplace practices are very valuable to businesses and people…as long as they’re implemented well and you know what you are talking about.  Unfortunately, too often that’s not the case.

How does a gap like this happen?  The researchers made the same mistakes that many stumble over, and these common oversights are what suck the value out of “Family Friendly” work practices.

The authors didn’t consider the importance of effective implementation and what that looks like in action.  And they didn’t position and talk about the practices in a broad, strategic, business-oriented way.  When FFWPs are effectively implemented and strategically positioned, the value that they provide to the business in terms of financial performance is proven and measureable.

So, how do you reconcile these two radically different conclusions?

Let’s start with a real-world example of how strategic flexibility helps a business run better, smarter and save money

We’ve been working with a multi-national company that wants flexibility in the way work is done to become a more visible and consistent part of their day-to-day business (the authors of the study consider all forms of flexibility “Family-Friendly” work practices).  As we interviewed leaders and employees, they shared numerous examples of how flexibility in the way work is done has allowed the business to run smarter and better:

• Because people were able to work from home, the company was able to stay open and operational on a number of days when snowstorms would have, otherwise, halted business.
• By shifting and staggering the times people on the team started and stopped working, the business was able to expand customer service hours without paying overtime to the non-exempt staff.
• Because their job requires absorbing and analyzing large amounts of complex information, people will often work remotely either from home or another quiet location to get more done efficiently and productively.
• As the company has grown, office space is a premium.  By coordinating days worked at home, and in the office, it limited the need for additional office space.
• Because many of the employees at the company have long commutes through heavy traffic, by shifting hours to avoid the worst traffic or working from home periodically the level of employee stress has been reduced.

And when asked, “What do you think the role of flexibility will be in the organization five years from now?”  Every person, no matter what level, said, “There will only be more of it” for all of the reasons listed above and more, because they know that flexibility, informal and formal, helps the business run more productively and saves money.

“Family-Friendly Work Practices…do not affect firm performance directly or indirectly” Say What?!

This client came to mind as I read the “Are Family-Friendly Workplace Practices a Valuable Firm Resource? study by Nick Bloom from Stanford University, Tobias Kretschmer from University of Munich and John Van Reenen published in the Strategic Management Journal  (June, 2010).

Normally, I give research a quick review and move on.   But, in this case, I’m felt compelled to respond to the study’s conclusions for two reasons.

First, Freek Vermeulen, an Associate Professor at the London School of Business, wrote about the results in an article on Forbes.com entitled, “Are Family-Friendly Workplace Practices Worth Their Money? New Evidence.”  This means that the results have entered the mainstream press, and are potentially influencing the decisions of business leaders who may be considering whether or not to support a work+life initiative.

Second, the study’s rather emphatic conclusion that Family-Friendly workplace practices don’t positively affect the financial performance of a business is, in fact, wrong.

Here are the study’s official conclusions in more detail:

“In this paper, we studied the impact of Family-Friendly Workplace Practices (FFWP) on firm performance, and found that increased provision of FFWP is only (weakly) positively correlated with better firm performance if we omit management quality.  Once we control for general management quality, there is not significant association between FFWP and performance measured in different ways.”

And it goes on:

“Our results support the conclusion that FFWP are neither a value-creating bundle of activities nor a lever for existing resources they do not affect firm performance directly or indirectly.”

“FFWP have implications different from other SHRM practices, as they affect employee well-being rather than firm financial performance.”

“Therefore, FFWP should be treated as policies that improve firm performance in terms of satisfaction of a particular stakeholder group—the firm’s employees—but that financial performance should not be the primary goal of implementing FFWP.”

“This calls for recasting FFWP as a non-market strategy affecting other outcomes than financial performance.”

Wow!  Can’t get much clearer than that. Now, let’s look at how they are wrong… (Click here for more)

(This post originally appeared in the HuffingtonPost.com)

Around Labor Day, the commentary on the current state of the workplace increases. But this year, it seemed that the media focused more on what the future of work will look like. A couple of examples that I’ve seen over the past few days include:

• A Jobs Plan for the Post-Cubicle Economy, part of The Future of Work—A Labor Day Special Report (TheAtlantic.com): Advocates creating unions that bring together the increasing number of independent workers.
• The Blended Workforce: The New Norm (Talent Management): Foretells of a future workplace made up of a combination of employees, consultants, independent contractors and contingent workers. Not unlike the Shamrock Organization that Charles Handy first predicted in his 1989 management classic, The Age of Unreason.
• Are Jobs Obsolete? (CNN.com): Challenges the relevance of the entire concept of a job.
• The Future of Work (Creatingthefuturetoday.com): Sees a workplace dominated by virtual teams and global nomads.

For all of their futuristic and forward thinking, these articles miss a very important point–the recognition and acknowledgment that work and life are now one and the same. You can no longer accurately predict the future of one, without also imaging the future of the other.

But, with the exception of the need to transform education, the articles barely mentioned how the predicted changes will affect our lives outside of work. It matters because the success of any transformation at work along the levels imagined, will depend on a number of corresponding changes happening off the job as well. For example, if an increasing percentage of workers are part of a contingent, on-demand, virtual, global workforce, then:

• What does that mean for the type of houses we live in and how we finance them?
• How do the roles of women and men as providers and caregivers need to adapt?
• How will that affect our choices to partner with someone and have a family?
• How do we have to restructure child care and eldercare, and who will provide it?
• How will we need to manage our finances differently?
• Not only how do we update the curriculum taught in elementary and secondary school, but how does the school day and school calendar need to change?
• What does “retirement” look like?

If these questions, and others, aren’t considered then a contingent, global, on-demand virtual workforce will flounder under the weight of misaligned personal obligations and circumstances.

The omission of “life” from questions about “work” is very Industrial Age. Twenty years ago, work and life were two separate and distinct spheres, at least in theory. “Work” was 9-to-5, in the office, Monday-thru-Friday and the other parts of life happened around that framework. Thanks (or, no thanks) to technology, demographic shifts, and economic globalization that’s not the case anymore. Changes in the way we work will directly impact the way we live. And, changes in the way we live will directly impact the way we work.

It’s a Jetsons world, but we still talk and think like we live in an episode of Mad Men. So, whenever you encounter “What is the future of work…”, add two words to the question “What is the future of work…and life?” That’s reality.

Do you think we adequately consider the impact of the future of work on the way we live our life off the job?  What are some of the questions we should be asking about both work and life in the coming years that aren’t being adequately addressed?

(This post originally appeared in FastCompany)

For more, I invite you to join me on my Fast Company blog and connect with me on Twitter @caliyost.

I’ve decided that every time I read an article, study or blog post that talks about how people don’t have meaningful access to flexibility, how managers don’t support flexibility, and/or how flexibility policies don’t match the actual practice in the business (this week here and here), I’m going to re-publish the following article on my blog.  It originally appeared in our “Make Flexibility Real”  newsletter (click here to subscribe), and clearly outlines the three steps that:

• Give people access to flexibility
• Create buy-in and understanding from managers and
• Make flexibility a meaningful part of the actual practice of the business.

I will keep posting it for as long as it takes to get the message across:  Work+life flexibility will not become part of the culture, help business achieve its goals and people manage their work+life fit by writing a policy, running a program, conducting a training session or putting a toolkit on the website.  That only happens with an approach along the lines of the following…

The Flex Strategy “Turducken.”  What?  The Backstory

It all started during a team discussion about the best way to present our next phase recommendations to a client.  In an attempt to wrap them under a unifying concept, FSG partner, Donna Miller, pointed out, “It’s a policy wrapped in a process, wrapped in a strategy.  A veritable flexibility  ‘turducken’ if you will.” And, with that, the perfect metaphor for “strategic flexibility” was born. A turducken.

And just as a butcher creates a turducken by wrapping chicken inside duck, inside turkey, organizations make flexibility real when they wrap policies inside of  guidelines, inside of a a plan for implementation that’s linked to business objectives:

What does a flexibility strategy “turducken” look like in action?  Although every organization is different, here are some highlights by layer:

Step 1: Flexibility Policies (Chicken):  This is where most organizations start and many end.  They draft policies that lay out the approval, implementation and review parameters of the five discrete formal flexible work arrangements: flexible schedules, telecommuting, compressed workweeks, reduced schedules, and job sharing.  For example:

• We define telecommuting as…/ We define a reduced schedule as…/
• If you telecommute, the company will/will not reimburse certain expense
• Every arrangement must be reviewed initially after 90 days and the every six months thereafter
• If the arrangement is deemed unsatisfactory to either the manager or employee, it can be terminated immediately.

But these one-size-fits-all policies are often one-dimensional.  They fail to come to life because there’s no way to contextualize the flexibility to the unique realities of a particular business challenge, job or person.   This is where the next layer of the flex strategy “turducken” becomes important…

Step 2: Flexibility Process to Tailor Win-Win Solutions (Duck): This layer takes flexibility to the next level.  It provides consistent guidelines to think through what type of flexibility will or will not work for a job or person.  Flexibility processes also address issues of fairness.  While everyone is not guaranteed the same type of flexibility, everyone does follow the same process for consideration of a request.

Here’s an example of three common levels of guidelines.  They build upon one another to harness flexibility and create win-win, tailored solutions:

Level 1—Manager/HR: A process to guide a manager or HR’s approval of a request for one of the five standard, one-size-fits-all formal flexible work arrangements.  Managers and/or HR are prompted to consider the performance of the employee, whether it makes sense for the business, etc.   This is where most organizations begin, but at some point they make three important realizations:

• Managers and HR can’t come up with a flexibility plan that is going to work for each individual person,
• The five, one-size-fits-all formal flexible work arrangements are too rigid.  They don’t allow the creativity required to tailor a solution that meets the work+life fit needs of the individual and the needs of the business, and,
• Most of the time people don’t need to formally change the way they are working.  They just want to make small, flexible adjustments in how, when and where they work day-to-day.

That leads to the creation of…

Level 2—Employee Work+Life Fit: A process that helps an employee take the lead to determine what type of formal and day-to-day flexibility will help them manage their work+life fit. These guidelines help them think through how, when and/or where they want to work, how their job will get done, etc  before talking to their manager and team.

Unfortunately, in many organizations, these employee-based guidelines only focus on work considerations and leave out personal realities that will also impact the success of flexibility.  This incomplete picture is the reason that I wrote my book, Work+Life:  Finding the Fit That’s Right for You. I wanted to help individuals create a solution with the greatest likelihood of success.

The processes in levels 1 and 2 address the individual’s need for flexibility to manage their personal work+life fit.  But how do organizations harness this same flexibility to deal with business challenges?  This is the next level of flexibility process…

Level 3—Team-based Innovation: A few companies are providing teams with guidelines to help tailor win-win solutions that use flexibility to target business challenges.  The process shows leaders, managers and employees how to engage in an ongoing conversation that rethinks rigid ways of working. Together they create flexible, innovative solutions.  For example, creating a rotating telework schedule to deal with overcrowding in the office, or a flexible shift schedule for global client coverage to ensure people aren’t “on call” all of the time.

This brings us to the final level of strategic flexibility.  You can have the best policies and guidelines, but they won’t have much impact unless there’s a…

Step 3: Plan for Strategic Implementation (Turkey): This is the piece of the “turducken” that too few organizations develop and execute.   Without a plan that creates readiness, links flexibility to other management practices, rewards buy in, communicates broadly, etc. flexibility will not become a meaningful part of an organization’s culture and way of operating.   Like laying a piece of paper on top of water, it floats but never penetrates.

Flexibility implementation must be intentional, have a clearly articulated impact on the business and its people, and be able to be measured.  Depending upon the unique goals of the organization, it might include:

• Creating a shared vision of flexibility that answers the questions “why do we need it?” and “what does it look like here?”
• Aligning work processes, management structures and rewards
• Linking flexibility to leadership competencies
• Encouraging a culture of shared responsibility versus top-down hierarchy

There’s more, but it gives you a sense of some of the key elements for deep and broad buy-in and impact.

Just as a butcher creates a turducken by wrapping chicken inside duck, inside turkey, organizations must link policy, process and strategy if they want to make flexibility real.

Has your organization completed all three steps of the flex strategy “turducken?”  If not, what’s missing?

For more, I invite you to sign up to receive the “Make Flexibility Real” newsletter via email, to visit my Fast Company blog, and to join me on Twitter @caliyost.

(I’m watching the path of hurricane Irene from my book writing cave. and praying for the best.  I want to ask business leaders the same question I did in February 2010 as a blizzard approached–will you strategically use telework to stay open and not ask employees to risk harm to get to work?  Or will you have to close down?  Here’s the original Fast Company post.)

As we brace for the second wave snowstorm bearing down on the East Coast, I’m remembering an experience I had a few years ago at a major pharmaceutical company widely recognized for their work+life strategy.

As I presented a series of Work+Life Fit seminars to the employees and managers, snow began to fall.  On that particular day, I was scheduled to facilitate one session in the morning and another after lunch.  Midway through the afternoon session, a few inches of snow had accumulated and you could tell people were anxious to get on the road.  Then the most amazing thing happened…

A number of managers in the room stood up and asked their team members to meet them in a group.  As the various teams gathered, you could hear everyone sharing how they planned to work the next day.  Some would work remotely, others thought they’d wait until after rush hour and come in later, and a couple planned to take personal days if they couldn’t find child care for their very young children.

As the teams reached agreement and dispersed, the managers gathered together and opened their laptops in a circle and began to coordinate with each other.  How would they conduct meetings that were scheduled?  Some decided to cancel meetings while others converted theirs to webinars.  One manager who oversaw a manufacturing facility sent emails to the plant foreman flexibly coordinating the staffing for the next day.

I watched in awe.  Finally, the manufacturing manager saw my faced and asked me, ‘’Why are you smiling and shaking your head?”  At this point, all of the managers in the room looked up.  I responded, “Do you realize how much money you are saving by flexibly coordinating tomorrow’s work in anticipation of the snow?”  You could tell they were a bit confused.

They didn’t see what they were doing as unusual.  It’s how they flexibly managed their business and in their culture.  So I pointed out, “See your competitor down the street?  Do they use flexibility as easily and strategically as you do to maintain operating continuity even if it snows?”  Another manager said, “No they don’t.”  I continued, “Okay, so who’s open for business tomorrow and who isn’t?”  Now they were smiling and shaking their heads, “We are.”

This group of managers knew that their company supported flexibility, but it was the first time they consciously realized how they were using it to meet a business need–staying open when nature strikes!

What about you and your organization?  Will you be open for business, or not?  Are you having coordinated conversations today about how everyone plans to work tomorrow, or if they plan to work?  Or will you just take your chances?

The “Flex and the C-Suite” series periodically showcases leaders who have made flexibility in the way work is done a key strategy for achieving business results smarter and better. In other words, they get it.

Barbara Taylor is the General Counsel of the national professional services firm, BDO USA, LLP. For the past five years, she has also been the senior leader champion of the firm’s award-winning BDO Flex strategy.

Our group has had the privilege of working with the internal BDO team helping them develop and implement their business-based approach to flexibility in how, when and where work is done. In our interview, Taylor shares important insights into why work+life flexibility is a strategic imperative and about the process the firm has followed to make it part of the culture.

Cali Yost: What are top challenges/opportunities you see for business over the next year or two?

Barbara Taylor: The economy will continue to be a very big challenge for some time. For BDO, this means a very competitive business environment and the pressure to do more with less. In addition, the 24/7 global work environment is here to stay. The challenge with that is how to manage work, schedules and resources across every time zone and keep up with everything that happens in the course of a continuous global workday.

I think the opportunity that comes from the challenges is that any business that can figure out how to manage those dynamics (such as matching people with client demand, maximizing use of space and resources, equipping teams to work across time zones) will have a distinct competitive advantage.

Cali Yost: In your opinion, how does work+life flexibility help an organization address those challenges or seize those opportunities?

Barbara Taylor: I see flexibility as one of the main tools that organizations can use to manage the business environment. At the core of the issue is that there are only 24 hours in every single day and people need to sleep at some point! Using flexibility–allowing people to shift their start/stop times, equipping people to work from home, and empowering them to flex around their work demands (e.g. after 3 am conference call, they sleep in and start work at 11)–are relatively simple ways to use flexibility to meet business demands.

At BDO, we have also started to think differently about people’s schedules and workloads over the course of a year. Making people more productive doesn’t just mean making them work more. It can mean re-thinking how to match their schedules with client demands. In accounting, there are times of the year we need people to be as productive/billable as possible. At other times of the year, we have more staff than work. There is an opportunity to use flexibility to better match salary costs to client demand. If someone reduces their hours during slow times it allows the employee more time for their personal lives and to recharge and also provide a financial break in salary costs for us. Then, that person can come back refreshed and highly billable during crunch times.

Flexibility also helps us manage growing real estate costs. When we open new offices, we have think about who can go to offices located in the suburbs, who can work from home, and who can share offices, which has real bottom line impacts.

Cali Yost: What three factors have been most critical to the successful implementation of flexibility at BDO? (Click here for more)

(This post originally appeared in FastCompay.com)

For more about how to make work+life flexibility part of an organization’s culture and business model, sign up to receive our “Make Flexibility Real” Newsletter and join me on Twitter @caliyost.

(While I’m on vacation, my friend, Kathie Lingle, Executive Director of WorldatWork’s Alliance for Work-Life Progress, it taking over blogging duties for this week.  Enjoy!)

Lately, it seems like everyone’s talking telework.

In the public sector, Congress has passed a series of laws designed to get employees out of the cubicle. In the private sector, the Society for Human Resources Management recently reported there has been a small increase in employers offering telecommuting on a full-time basis. Another recent study shows that the vast majority of leaders and managers intellectually grasp the business case for telework: it’s green; it cuts costs; it improves health outcomes, productivity, and engagement. We also know that today’s technology (including security protection) is sophisticated enough to support work wherever it takes place.

Sounds like a whole bunch of teleworking must be going on all across the land, right? Well, not quite.

According to my triangulation of the numbers from several disparate reports, somewhere between 6 – 8% of the Federal workforce and approximately 10 – 12% of all non-self-employed U.S. employees are teleworking at least one day per month. Not exactly a steady diet, and anything but a groundswell.

If this strikes you as underwhelming, that’s precisely the key message of WorldatWork’s Special Report, Telework 2011. For the first time in the nine years we’ve been monitoring the telework trend line, the number of employed Americans who worked remotely at least one day a month dropped between 2008 and 2010. This decline was relatively small—just shy of 6%—but it follows years of gains.

In spite of all the attention being paid to the merits of telework, there has been a surprisingly low uptake in something so powerful that it can simultaneously make people feel healthier, work more productively and reduce expenses.  If this were a piece of software, it would be selling like hot cakes, no matter what the price.  But the product is not the problem. People are the problem.

Not all people. Just the troglodytes among us. You know who I’m talking about. If you haven’t ever worked for (or with) one, you know someone who does. You’ve already refreshed your memory via dictionary.com, so let me hasten to skip over “prehistoric cave dweller” and skip right to my favorite part, which cites a slang word from 1956, “trog,” meaning:

A person unacquainted with affairs of the world, devoid of a single progressive idea and lacking the slightest awareness of social and cultural advances.

The path to job autonomy is an obstacle course populated by trogs who throw out an endless variety of challenges and objections, many of which are contradictory and unsubstantiated.

How do I know you’re working if I can’t see you?

We tried that once and it didn’t work.

I gave up everything for this job and you will, too.

Only slackers are interested in this sort of thing!

The trogs’ complaints go on and on. I’ve been in the work-life field for more than 20 years, and the chorus of trogs has never disappeared. Every new advance in telework research or policy is met by a chorus of naysayers. Sometimes the trogs are even
in organizations that were once recognized as trailblazers in workplace flexibility but have come under new leadership.

So where do we go from here, realizing that we may be losing ground, even if temporarily?  I have three ideas:

1) We’ll get there. We have to keep our collective eye on the Big Picture, to paraphrase the futurist Mary O’Hara-Devereaux. Her metaphor of navigating through a rugged transition zone between the now obsolete Industrial era to a new set of values, practices and structures strikes me as both prophetic and comforting.  We will get to the other side, but the journey is going to continue to be uneven and occasionally painful.

2) It’s up to you. If those who work want more control over the conditions of their work, they are going to have to exert the courage to make that happen. Research can be done and policies can be put in place, but in the end, each person has to make it happen for themselves.

3) Expose the trogs for the out-of-touch obstructionists they are. You can’t assume those designated as “in charge” will do this for you, because, as you probably know, sometimes they are the trogs. If there are people in your business putting up roadblocks to telework, it may be time to start proving your case by showing them just how well it can work.

The good news is that no one in a business context actually intends (or can afford) to be a troglodyte. They may be scared of new ideas, but when they see them start to work, they convert themselves like transformers. And remember that trogs are in the minority, even if it doesn’t always seem like it. They are simply adept at making a lot of attention-grabbing noise.  Most people around you are also struggling to make their job fit with their life, so you can safely recruit them as allies.

Judy Martin of Work/Life Nation recently conducted a great video interview with me about the findings from the NEW 2011 Work+Life Fit Reality Check – Check it out! Thanks, Judy.

(This post originally appeared in FastCompany.com)

Over the past five years, new research shows that we’re all much more comfortable with the concept of work+life flexibility.  We no longer expect lawyers, managers or web designers to always show up to an office, 9-to-5, Monday through Friday.  But what about retail sales associates, call center workers, or housekeeping staff in hotels?

Can low-wage hourly workers access the same work flexibility to manage their lives both on and off the job?

According to two recent reports, the answer is “yes, but…” The authors of Flexible Workplace Solutions for Low-Wage Hourly Workers: A Framework for a National Conversation, Liz Watson, Legislative Counsel, Workplace Flexibility 2010 and Jennifer E. Swanberg Ph.D. Associate Professor, University of Kentucky and Executive Director, Institute for Workplace Innovation, and of Improving Work-Life Fit in Hourly Jobs: An Underutilized Cost-Cutting Strategy in a Globalized World, Work Life Law, UC Hastings College of the Law say:

Yes, low-wage hourly workers can flexibly manage their work+life fit and businesses will realize tangible bottom line benefits.  But it requires:

Understanding that the work+life fit issues and, therefore, the solutions for low-wage hourly workers are more complex. Some low wage workers need more flexibility in their jobs, some need less, and some just need more work in order to find a better fit. Flexible Workplace Solutions for Low-Wage Hourly Workers has a great chart that clearly lays out the too much flexibility/not enough flexibility challenge of low-wage workers:  (Click here for more)