One in 19 European workers has flexible working on paper and a rota in real life
A gym membership is not the same as going to the gym.
One in 19 workers in Europe holds a flexible working policy and can choose nothing about how their week looks like On 27 August, Eurofound published the number that breaks the hybrid story, and almost nobody ran it. The report is "The shift to hybrid working: Management challenges", by research managers Sara Riso and Jorge Cabrita. The headline everybody screenshotted was 24%. The split underneath it: 48% pick both their hours and their place 17% pick the place, not the hours 13% pick the hours, not the place 22% pick neither It runs on the European Working Conditions Survey 2024, same questions across all 27 member states, paid for by an EU agency that is not getting richer off the back of the answer. No vendor, no licence waiting at the end of the PDF. The stake, plainly: companies across Europe report flexible working coverage to boards, candidates and award panels, and a fifth of the people inside that number are handed a rota by somebody else. They count as a win. They are living a shift pattern. The complaint that fixed it arrived with no name on it, because putting your name on it was risky Years before this report, at one of my previous jobs, I received an anonymous complaint from a colleague in the Global South. Company work trips were being treated as personal time for anyone who needed a visa, so people were doing the whole embassy run, the forms, the appointment, the queue, on their own unpaid hours, while colleagues who needed no visa simply booked a flight. Nob…