Faced with the negative effects of atypical or flexible working hours imposed, organizational solutions on the scale of work collectives would allow better control of employees on these schedules, in order to limit absences and improve attractiveness.
The problem
Literature in health economics and epidemiology has largely shown that atypical (evening, night, weekend, etc.) or flexible (fragmented, variable, etc.) schedules had negative effects on the health of employees, whether physical or mental (Tucker and Folkard, 2012). These deleterious effects go through various mechanisms, gap with the biological clock, stress linked to unpredictability, but also difficulties in conciliation with family life or with sports activities for example. However, these non -standard schedules are frequent: in France, according to the survey of working conditions, in 2019, 23.8% of employees usually worked on Saturday, 11.3% on Sundays, 7.4% per night, 10.3% were at work posted (2*8, 3*8) and 28.9% experienced variable hours (Erhel et al, 2024). If an objective may be in some cases to reduce the frequency of these atypical or variable hours, this is not possible in all sectors and trades, in particular for all those who require continuity of service (health, transport, home help, etc.). In this case, the challenge becomes to limit their negative effects on health. A track is to give employees more control over their schedules.
The proposal
Give employees a control capacity on their working hours, even if these are atypical or variable.
How does it work ?
It is a question of displaying an objective of flexibility of schedules controlled by employees, accessible to all (including workers for which telework is impossible), and to favor practices of management of schedules giving employees a capacity for choice and adaptation according to their preferences and their family and personal constraints.
In practice, it is a question of using digital tools for managing complex plannings (such as developed for transport for example) in order to take into account the preferences expressed upstream by employees (on days and working hours) in the definition of individual schedules. These centralized tools must be supplemented by management of schedules at the team level, with an adaptability in the event of an unexpected.
On what research work is the proposal founded
The literature in epidemiology and health economics has greatly interested in the effects of working hours on health, showing a negative impact of atypical schedules, but also posted work or long -work for health work (Tucker, Folkard, 2012). More recently, research has also analyzed the development and dissemination of new forms of time constraints, in connection with the economy of services or with the digitization of the economy: variable hours, fragmented times, overflow of work on personal time (Messenger, 2018). These constraints also have unfavorable effects on the health of employees (Erhel et al, 2024 ; Ha et al, 2020).
On the other hand, these works also show that the control of employees on their schedules has a positive effect on health, and comes to thwart the negative effects of atypical or flexible schedules (Bassanini and Caroli, 2015 ; Erhel et al, 2024 ; Shiri et al, 2022).
This perspective also joins human resources management work which has since the health crisis an accentuation of the flexibility of places and working hours, but also the persistence of inequalities of access to this flexibility in companies (depending on the trades) and differences in its effects on remuneration and careers. The fight against these inequalities supposes a proactive policy of the company to give room for maneuver and avoid the brakes on their use, by targeting all employees (Kossek et al, 2021).
How to implement
This proposal must be implemented in terms of businesses. In practice, it can rely on digital schedules for schedules such as software that creates schedules based on service constraints and displayed preferences for workers. Adjustments are then possible at the team level, in the event of unforeseen events. The proposal must also involve intermediate supervision and planning managers, which constitute a very important profession in this perspective of flexibility controlled by employees. It must be accompanied by a global communication in order to show that this measure concerns all employees, whatever their personal situations or their functions.
In order to promote the dissemination of this type of practices, communication for business negotiation players and managers HR Can be developed, insisting on the positive effects of this type of practices (better health, lower absenteeism, better attractiveness). It is also possible to make this question of schedules control an object of negotiations on the scale of companies and branches.