You hear that word everywhere these days, don’t you? ‘Flexibility.’ Every company’s got it on their website, in their job ads. Sounds great on paper. They all say they’re all about it, adapting, being agile, all that jazz.
My old place, let’s just call them ‘MegaCorp Solutions,’ they were HUGE on talking about flexibility. I mean, they had posters. Shiny ones. ‘Embracing a Flexible Future!’ was one of their big slogans. You’d see it in the lobby, in the canteen. But let me tell you, trying to get even a tiny bit of actual, real-world flexibility out of them was like trying to squeeze water from a rock.
I remember this one time, I just wanted to shift my start and end times by about 30 minutes. Not asking for the world, right? Just wanted to miss the worst of the traffic and maybe, just maybe, see my kids for more than five minutes before they were off to bed. You’d think I’d asked to dismantle the entire server room with a toothpick. The hoops I had to jump through! Meetings, forms, ‘policy considerations’… all for half an hour. It was just ridiculous.
But the real eye-opener came later.
My partner got this amazing job offer. A real career-changer. The only snag? It was in a city about three hours away. It was a massive deal for us, a big discussion, but it was just too good an opportunity to let slide. So, I went to my manager, the same guy who’d approved those ‘Flexible Future!’ posters, and laid it out. I told him I was super committed to my job, loved my team, and had been there for five solid years, always hitting my targets, handling big projects. I asked if we could look into remote work, or even a hybrid setup – maybe a couple of days in the office, the rest remote. I figured, with all their talk, this would be a no-brainer.
Well, you can probably guess what happened. He got that shifty look. ‘Oh, that’s… well, that’s quite complicated,’ he started. And then came the list of reasons why it absolutely, positively couldn’t happen:
- ‘Our current infrastructure isn’t really set up for full-time remote in your kind of role.’
- ‘It wouldn’t be fair to the other team members who are physically present every day.’
- ‘Company policy is quite clear about needing key personnel on-site.’
It was like all those shiny posters and grand statements about flexibility were just… gone. Poof. Vanished. The bottom line was, ‘Be here, at your desk, or don’t be here at all.’ No middle ground. No discussion.
So, I was stuck. My partner’s career and our family’s future on one side, and this job that suddenly felt incredibly rigid on the other. It wasn’t much of a choice when I really thought about it. I handed in my notice. It was scary, I won’t pretend it wasn’t. I had responsibilities, a mortgage, the whole deal.
And here’s the kicker, the part that still makes me chuckle a bit. After leaving MegaCorp, I had to scramble. I started picking up freelance projects. Small stuff at first, then bigger things. It was tough, being out on my own, no guaranteed paycheck. But you know what I found? Real flexibility. The kind where I actually decide my hours. The kind where if I need to deal with a family thing, I just do it. No forms, no ‘policy reviews,’ no asking for permission to live my life.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, this freelance life, don’t get me wrong. There’s hustle involved. But that whole experience taught me that genuine flexibility isn’t about slogans or what’s written in an employee handbook. It’s about trust, and it’s about focusing on results, not on how many hours someone is sitting in a specific chair. A lot of these big companies, they love to talk the talk, but they’re terrified of actually letting go of that old-fashioned control. So yeah, I learned what that word really means, and it definitely wasn’t from any corporate training session.
