WeAreHuman@Work | #048 | Policy, Not Permission: 34% of hybrid workers decide their own days

New here? This is row four of ten. Start with #044 and the People Expectations Framework™, both free.

Last week, row three ended on the price of the deal: keep people employable enough to leave. This week, the row that sets the terms on which they stay.

Flexibility is the last of the four transactional terms: control over when, where and how much I work. It is also the row with the most paperwork. Almost every organisation has a policy. Hybrid guidelines, core hours, an intranet page with a little diagram of the week. Ask HR whether people have flexibility and the answer is yes, with a link.

Ask the team, and you get another answer. The policy says two days in the office. The director comes in five. So, in practice, does everyone who hopes to be promoted.

Charles Handy wrote the line at the top of this letter in 1995, about organisations learning to work without a shared building. Thirty years before anyone said "hybrid", he saw that trust does not scale by policy. It lives in groups small enough for people to know each other, which is where permission is granted or withheld. People answer what the team does, not what the policy says.

So here is my position, before the evidence: flexibility is not what the policy allows. It is what the team permits, and people price the deal by the permission.

Expectation first, experience second, and then the question every attendance mandate hides: who decides?

— Tanguy

Row four, read twice: what people expect from flexibility, and what they actually control. Then the fourth Expectation Gap, a one-page Team Flexibility Agreement to take to your next team meeting, a self-audit and five metrics.

Here is the figure for your next people review, and five things it tells you.

Your flexibility policy is not a promise. It is a permission slip, and someone else signs it. Gallup surveyed 17,660 US employees from its random-sample panel in May 2025. Among hybrid workers, only 34% decide their own days; 35% let their manager or team decide, and 31% let the employer or leadership decide. Two in three hybrid workers have the arrangement without the decision. And the signature changes how the same deal feels: when the team sets the days, 91% call the policy fair; when the employer does, 73%. Eighteen points of fairness, decided by who holds the pen. Now read the employers' side: 53% of those Randstad surveyed think workers expect too much autonomy. That is not a policy. It is a reluctance tied to the intranet.

A mandate is an admission that leaders cannot manage what they cannot see. Required office days up 12%, attendance up 1–3%: compliance without conversion. People who cannot negotiate don't argue; they leave. In Randstad's data, the share who quit a job for lack of flexibility rose from 31% to 34%, and 43% would not take a new job without it. Picture the analyst who badges in on Tuesday and takes the recruiter's call on Thursday. The mandate bought the attendance. It did not buy the analyst. Grant the strongest case for the office: 81% of employers say hybrid work has made collaboration harder, and I believe them. But in the Trip.com trial, hybrid work left performance and promotions unchanged and cut quits by a third. Collaboration is a team problem. When you no longer trust the team to solve it, you reach for a company-wide rule.

Flexibility goes to the people the organisation already trusts. Last week, skills were rationed by rank. Row four rations by role. Randstad's non-office workers have less say over when they work (60%) than their office colleagues (65%), and Indeed finds that the generations who want flexibility most get no more of it. For the front line, flexibility was never about where. It is about when: a rota published far enough ahead to plan a life around, a shift swap that doesn't need three signatures. And where flexibility is granted, it is quietly invoiced. In a vignette experiment with a national sample of managers in Singapore, Wang and Chung found remote working "associated with significantly worse managerial perceptions in commitment, productivity" and promotion prospects, and the penalty grew for mothers when remote work was framed as a policy for parents. Flexibility offered as a favour is repaid with promotions.

A four-day week does not test your people. It tests whether you ever redesigned the work. Most of the argument is about where; the strongest new evidence is about how much. Wen Fan, Juliet Schor and colleagues followed 2,896 employees in 141 organisations through a six-month four-day week with no cut in pay. They found "improvements in burnout, job satisfaction, mental health and physical health—a pattern not observed in 12 control companies," and the larger the cut in a person's own hours, the larger the gain. The firms volunteered, so read it as a strong signal, not proof for all. But look at the order: every firm reorganised the work first and took the day off second. Time handed back without redesign is not flexibility. It is the same week, compressed.

Stop writing flexibility policies. Hand over the decision. The lever is not a better policy; it is a named decision right. In the STAR trial, Phyllis Moen, Erin Kelly and colleagues gave teams at a large US firm more control over when and where they worked, and trained supervisors to support it. In a randomised field trial, that "lowered turnover intentions 12 months later" and reduced voluntary exits over almost three years. The law is already changing decisions. In Great Britain, employees have had the right to request flexible working from day one since 6 April 2024: two requests a year, an answer within two months, no refusal without consultation. Switzerland gives no general right to work from home; it has to be agreed, and when the employer requires it, the employer contributes to the costs under Art. 327a of the Code of Obligations and a 2019 Federal Supreme Court ruling. Either way, the decision belongs in the contract or in the team, never only on the intranet. Then say it in the employment deal, out loud: we will tell you who decides, and we will put that decision as close to you as the work allows.

Flexibility is not what the policy allows. It is what the team permits. Everything else is a privilege on loan.

Policies are written for the building; the team grants permission. Here is the one-page instrument I use to move the decision to where the work happens.

Name the decider. For each choice (days in the office, start and finish times, hours), write who decides: the person, the team or the organisation. Default to the person. Move a decision up only with a reason the team can repeat.

Fix the anchors. List the few moments the work genuinely needs together: the weekly team day, client hours, the rota deadline. Everything not anchored belongs to the person.

Write the front-line version. Where the work cannot move, flexibility is about when: how far ahead the rota is published, shift swaps without a manager's signature, a fair share of the unsocial hours.

Make it universal. The agreement covers everyone on the team, not just parents and carers. Wang and Chung's managers penalised remote work less when it was framed as a policy for all.

Review it, and read the gap. Every quarter: what the agreement allows against what people actually used, and every request refused. A team that uses none of its flexibility is not loyal. It is waiting for permission.

Use it free, in full, with attribution. Draft it with the team, not for it: the disagreements about the anchors are the point.

Provenance: it extends the team-level redesign tested in the STAR trial (Moen, Kelly and colleagues, 2017). What it adds: a decision right named for each choice, a front-line version, and a quarterly read of allowed against used.

Your turn. Who decides which days you work from home: you, your team, or someone you have never met? Hit reply; I read every one. And if you know an executive committee drafting a five-day mandate, forward this before it is signed.

Three questions for your next leadership meeting. Yes or no.

Three "no" answers mean your flexibility lives on the intranet. The five metrics below tell you where it stops.

No new inventions: five established measures, read together rather than one by one.

🌿 Row five: Well-being — Sunday 1 November

Four rows down, and the transactional currency is complete. Flexibility decides who controls the hours. Well-being asks what is left of the person at the end of them. Next week opens the relational rows with the fifth Expectation Gap: the distance between the wellness app and the workload.

Ten rows, ten Sundays. In December, subscribers receive the complete Expectation Gap: all ten rows in one workbook, with the questions and five metrics for every row. Stay for the set.

— Tanguy

Policy, not permission — the row-four finding: flexibility exists where a person or their team holds the decision, not where a policy grants eligibility. This edition's frame.

Decision right — who decides when and where someone works: the person, the team or manager, or the building. Gallup's three-way split, at 34%, 35% and 31%.

Team Flexibility Agreement — a one-page team agreement that names who decides each flexibility choice, fixes the few anchors the work needs, writes a front-line version, covers everyone, and reviews allowed against used every quarter. This edition's instrument.

The Expectation Gap (row four) — the distance between "control over when, where and how much I work, written into the terms of the deal" and what people judge they are getting, read two ways: what the policy allows, and what the team permits. This edition's measure.

Well-being — the expectation that the work leaves people room to recover, set by workload and pace rather than by a benefit. Read next Sunday as the gap between the app and the workload. Row five.

The Expectation Gap sits inside the People Centricity Methodology™: Empathise, Strategise, Realise, Analyse. It is Empathise made measurable, the first two links of the People Centricity Formula™, read one row at a time.

Bloom, N., Han, R., & Liang, J. (2024). Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. Nature, 630(8018), 920–925. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2

Dulac, T. (2026, September). People Expectations Framework™. PeopleCentriX. https://www.peoplecentrix.eu/people-expectations-framework

Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023, c. 33. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/33

Fan, W., Schor, J. B., Kelly, O., & Gu, G. (2025). Work time reduction via a 4-day workweek finds improvements in workers' well-being. Nature Human Behaviour, 9(10), 2153–2168. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02259-6

Flex Index. (2025). Flex report Q3 2025. Scoop Technologies. https://www.lse.ac.uk/management/assets/documents/research/flex-index-reports/Flex-Report-Q3-2025.pdf

Handy, C. (1995). Trust and the virtual organization. Harvard Business Review, 73(3), 40–50.

Moen, P., Kelly, E. L., Lee, S.-R., Oakes, J. M., Fan, W., Bray, J., Almeida, D., Hammer, L., Hurtado, D., & Buxton, O. (2017). Can a flexibility/support initiative reduce turnover intentions and exits? Results from the Work, Family, and Health Network. Social Problems, 64(1), 53–85. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spw033

Pendell, R. (2025, September 2). Hybrid work in retreat? Barely. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/694361/hybrid-work-retreat-barely.aspx

Randstad. (2026). Workmonitor 2026: The great workforce adaptation. Randstad N.V. https://www.randstad.com/workmonitor/

Shrivastava, A., Bernard, B., Kennedy, J., Ullrich, L., Feist, L., Puri, S., Sondergeld, V., & Aoki, Y. (2026). What workers expect when they're expecting better work: Findings from the 2025 Indeed Workforce Insights Survey. Indeed Hiring Lab. https://hiringlab.indeed.com/2026/01/19/2025-indeed-workforce-insights-survey/

Swiss Federal Supreme Court. (2019, April 23). Judgment 4A_533/2018 [Employer's contribution to home-office costs, Art. 327a CO].

Wang, S., & Chung, H. (2026). Revisiting flexibility stigma: How framing remote working shapes bias against remote workers. Gender, Work & Organization. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.70115