The economy has experienced major turbulence since the beginning of the pandemic. Today, inflation is at a more than 40 year‐high, supply chains are squeezed, and consumers are struggling to find the goods and services that they need. Meanwhile, employers are desperate to find workers.
Staffing shortages are the product of a variety of factors, but one issue that makes it harder for employers to find and retain employees is that workers’ preferences around work have changed. Specifically, one well‐known shift in the labor force is that many workers are eager to continue working remotely and flexibly, as they have over the past two years.
Indeed, according to a recent Gallup poll, among workers with remote‐work capable jobs, 40 percent worked either exclusively (8 percent) or partly (32 percent) remotely pre‐pandemic, but a whopping 91 percent of remote‐work capable workers prefer to work exclusively or partly remotely post‐pandemic. This is likely because workers have now experienced the benefits of remote work: in a Pew poll, among workers new to working remotely, 44 percent said that working remote makes it easier to get work done and meet deadlines (while 46 percent say it is about as easy to get work done as in the office) and 64 percent said that it made it easier to balance their work and personal life.
These benefits are especially salient for working parents; for years, working parents have said that flexible work was critical to their success in the workplace and at home. For instance, in one 2009 survey, 69 percent of highly qualified “opt‐out” moms cited workplace flexibility as a reason for their leaving the workplace, and in a 2009 survey by the Rockefeller Foundation 51 percent of parents said that more flexible hours/schedules were the most important change that would allow them to evenly balance their job or business, marriage, and children.
After working remotely through the pandemic, working parents seem more convinced than ever that flexible work is a valuable benefit. In a McKinsey survey, working parents with young children were most likely to say that they preferred working primarily from home compared to workers with older children or workers without children (Figure 1) and in another McKinsey survey, working parents said that the most important reasons for recently leaving their jobs included work‐life balance (4th reason), caring for family (5th reason), and ability to work remotely (9th reason).
Figure 1. Employees with young children are more likely to prefer primarily remote work
Source: McKinsey and Company, What Employees are Saying About the Future of Remote Work (2021).
Parents’ preference for remote and flexible work seems to have increased over the course of the pandemic: a recent Institute for Family Studies (IFS) YouGov survey found that more than half of parents with children under age 18 said that COVID-19 has made them more likely to prefer working from home, either most of the time or part of the time, and interestingly, a majority of working parents thought that the ideal arrangement was to share child care duties among partners and both work flexible hours.
Of course, not every working parent prefers remote work, and only about half of the American labor force can do their jobs remotely, even part of the time. As with most things, there can be drawbacks to remote work—for example, many workers say that they feel less connected to coworkers when working remotely. As a result, companies will have to work together with employees to determine the ideal arrangement for individual employees and decide what workplace policies balance worker preferences against workplace needs.
But in the meantime, policies that make it more difficult for working parents to work flexibly should be reviewed and updated. There are a variety of regulations that make flexible and remote work more difficult, and these should be relaxed or eliminated.
For instance, local labor regulations that make workplaces more rigid to “protect” workers make work less flexible and therefore make work and family life less compatible. Meanwhile, federal labor regulations, like the Fair Labor Standards Act, that require workers be compensated for overtime with payment rather than through future time off also make balancing work and family life more difficult. These rules should be reformed to accommodate families with needs for flexible work.
Additionally, regulations that limit gig economy work make flexible work more difficult to come by for parents, especially since parents are more likely than non‐parents to take gig economy jobs. The Biden administration has said that it is “committed to ending the abusive practice of misclassifying employees as independent contractors, which deprives these workers of critical protections and benefits,” but this is the wrong approach. The administration should consider that a majority of gig workers in a variety of surveys prefer the independent contractor designation that makes flexible work possible and are happy with their employment arrangement.
Moreover, home based businesses must be legalized. Currently, zoning bans and restricts many types of home based businesses, and additional permitting and licensing requirements create barriers to entrepreneurship. As one example, the cottage food industry took off during the pandemic, but in some states like Rhode Island, moms can be shut down for selling something as benign as home‐baked cookies. This is unfortunate because selling food online—and working from home more generally—are opportunities for working parents balancing childcare needs, families balancing elderly care needs, and for recent refugees and immigrants.
Occupational licensing laws also need reform to accommodate flexible work. For example, certain states require lawyers to have practiced full‐time for a series of consecutive years to be licensed, and this penalizes working parents that want to work part time or take time off in order to balance family and career. These rules should be reformed to accommodate working parents and workers of all stripes.
This is only a sample of the many reforms that should be made to increase flexible and remote work opportunities, and as workers and companies are rethinking expectations around work, policymakers should rethink the many policies that prohibit the flexible and remote arrangements that working parents crave.
If what parents say is any indication, flexible work is the future. Policymakers would be wise to clear the way for it.
Source: Cato Institute
