Having control over their own time makes workers happier and more likely to stay in their jobs. This was the result of an analysis by US researchers who looked at data from the “National Study of the Changing Workforce”, carried out by the Families and Work Institute. The survey listened to 1,516 workers in the United States, and contains information on how much control people have over their working hours, how satisfied they are in their jobs and lives, and whether they feel they have enough time.

Stephanie Tepper and Neil Lewis Jr., behavioral scholars, sought to understand the difference between feeling that you don’t have enough time to do what you need to do (what they called a “sense of time scarcity”) versus the feeling that you have no control over your time.

“These feelings can go hand in hand, but they don’t always. For instance, you might feel a sense of time scarcity when your schedule is filled with tasks you don’t have time to complete, even if you have total control over that schedule,” the authors wrote in an article published by the Harvard Business Review.

They found:

1. People who had greater control over their time had the highest job satisfaction and overall satisfaction with their lives; 
2. Those who felt a sense of time scarcity had less satisfaction with their jobs and were less satisfied with their lives; 
3. The number of hours people worked was not related to how satisfied people were with their jobs; 
4. For those who had more control over their time, feeling time scarcity did not undermine their job satisfaction as much as it did for those who had less control over their time. Employers should therefore create and tailor flexible work policies to meet diverse employee needs, fostering satisfaction and retention.

“These findings mean that feeling like you don’t have enough time and feeling like you don’t have control over the limited time you do have are both negative predictors of well-being,” said the scientists.

However, Tepper and Lewis pointed out that not all jobs can be performed remotely. For this reason, they stressed that the findings refer especially to “knowledge workers”, who are those able to do all or most of their work with a laptop and an internet connection.

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Source: Families and Work Institute | HBR