WE GOT FLEXIBLE WORK WRONG
- 23 hours ago
- 8 min read
While flexible work is here, the way business owners are being told to do it is far too simple for the reality of most small and mid‑sized businesses—and it ignores the science of human behaviour.
If you run a business, you are likely holding a mix of tight margins, rising costs, compliance pressure, and a team that genuinely wants more say in how, when, and where they work. You want to keep good people and stay attractive in the market, but you also need the work to get done, reliably, effectively, and without burning yourself or the bottom line out.
With a background in commercial growth and the scientific education of human performance, the answer is not in more WFH days. That reactive response is the same as saying yes to your child because they want something. If we zoom out on what the impact of saying 'yes' has, we may find the benefits don't fully serve either party long term.
While 'flexible' sounds like something people want, the reality is that most human beings do not know how to optimise their time and their attention. In fact, we're getting worse at it.
'Flexible days' actually look like reactivity, cognitive load, constant context‑switching and domain‑switching. They do not look like flexible optimisation of productivity, satisfaction and flow. And that is what we should be aiming for as businesses, and contributing to as employees.
FLEXIBLE WORK SHOULD BE A PERFORMANCE CONSIDERATION BEFORE A POLICY CONSIDERATION
Over half of employees now say flexible work or consistent WFH is one of their top benefits, and many are willing to trade salary for it. People are also increasingly sensitive to the time and money cost of commuting, and want more of that back for family, health, or rest.
From a behavioural science lens, this is normal. Humans adapt fast. What felt generous in 2020 now feels like baseline in 2026. The joy resets; the expectation stays. That is hedonic adaptation in real life.
But if we look at Australia's current productivity outputs and our collective state of mental and physical health, we're missing this important science.
Attention is the gateway to everything we do and how we feel.
Neuroscientist Dr Amishi Jha's research in Peak Mind shows that when attention fragments under stress, multitasking, and constant environmental demands, working memory shrinks, emotional regulation drops, and the ability to make good decisions degrades. In her lab work with high‑stress populations (from military to healthcare to corporate teams), she found that without training, attention naturally deteriorates under pressure. With training, it can be protected and strengthened.
What we're actually seeing today is:
Workplaces offering more flexibility
Expectations keep rising upward
Underneath, work patterns, coordination, and decision‑making stay much the same
The brain is forced to switch tasks and domains constantly, which Jha's research confirms drains finite attention resources with every switch. Each switch requires clearing the previous task from working memory before engaging with the next.
So the problem is not that people want flexibility. Of course they do.
The problem is that we are treating flexibility as 'location and days' instead of treating it as a performance system.
SPORT GIVES US A BETTER LENS
High‑performing sport does not start with, 'Which days are we at the stadium?'
It starts with:
What are we trying to achieve this week?
What type of work is needed? Skill, conditioning, tactics, recovery….
What state do we need people in? High intensity, deep focus, light reset…
Where should that happen? Gym, on court, video room, quiet space…..
Then training gets built around those answers. Load and recovery are planned. Breaks are deliberate. If someone is distracted or flat, the coach and player adjust the drills, the environment, and/or the intensity.
Work, especially knowledge work, rarely gets that level of thought. Instead, we copy a pattern similar to 'Three days in, two days from home'. Everyone's calendar fills. Meetings extend – although not effectively. Deep work squeezes into evenings. People are 'flexible' but not actually performing or recovering any better.
HOW ATTENTION ACTUALLY WORKS IN YOUR BRAIN
Your brain has three attention subsystems — alerting, orienting, and executive control — that share one limited pool of resources. When one ramps up, another steps back. If your orienting system is locked onto a Slack ping, you miss a key email. If your executive system is managing five tabs at once, your ability to weigh options and plan action steps collapses.
Designing work without accounting for this is like running elite athletes without planning load or recovery, and wondering why performance drops.
WHY FLEXIBLE WORK BREAKS LOCK-IN AND LOCK-THROUGH
Dr Brené Brown's work on lock‑in and lock‑through power is essential to this conversation.
Lock‑in is the ability to fully focus, commit attention and energy, and perform under pressure. This is what elite performers do in deep work, flow, deliberate practice, and deep focus.
Lock‑through is the intentional transition out of one domain and into another—the boat lock metaphor that moves you between different water levels without capsizing. The problem, Brown explains, is that most of us don't lock through properly. We rush the transition, carry residual stress forward, and arrive in the next domain half‑present and frustrated.
THE LOSS OF THE COMMUTE AS A TRANSITION SPACE
In a traditional office, the commute served as an unplanned lock‑through space, and it was still hard to transition. Even if it was ten minutes in the car or on the train, it gave the brain a buffer to release one role before entering the next.
WFH removes that buffer. The locking‑through now happens moment to moment, with no structure.
One minute you're deep in a client file. The next, a child walks in. Then you're on a call. Then checking a supplier quote.
Brown's research draws a critical distinction here: cognitive switching and domain switching are not the same thing.
A cognitive switch is moving from one task to another task in the same domain (email to email).
A domain switch is moving between entirely different mental and emotional spaces: from strategic thinking to parenting, from sales to household admin. Domain switching carries a far higher cognitive lift and drains what Brown calls your 'brain bank account'.
Jha adds that scattered attention impairs learning and memory formation. When information cycles through working memory too quickly, nothing sticks. In a WFH environment with no deliberate boundaries, people spend their whole day switching their attention across domains, and wondering why they feel exhausted but got little done.
FLEXIBLE WORK NEEDS DISCIPLINED ATTENTION TRAINING
If attention is a skill, and the modern workplace is now filled with people whose attention has been undertrained for years, the answer is not to add more flexibility.
The answer is to train the skill.
Jha's research shows that just 12 minutes a day of focused mindfulness practice can stabilise and even improve attention under high stress—a finding replicated across military, education, healthcare, and workplace populations.
And this matters especially in a world where workplace policy increasingly accommodates neurodiversity, including ADHD. A disciplined attention training is a trainable capability that benefits every employee, neurodivergent or not.
Brené Brown's lock‑in/lock‑through framework maps perfectly onto this. Just as elite athletes don't walk out of a gym and straight into a high‑stakes meeting without a transition ritual, knowledge workers need structured practices to protect both their focus and their transitions.
DESIGN YOUR OWN FLEXIBLE WORK SYSTEM
For SMEs, copying big‑company policy is risky. You feel the cost of every bad hire, every unproductive week, every extra layer of admin.
A more useful question to ask is:
If our business was an elite sporting team, how would we actually set it up to perform?
At A Human Edge, we approach flexible work the way a good coaching team approaches a season plan.
1. START WITH THE WORK
Once you've designed your operating system (how impact is delivered, not an org chart), we begin by looking at what actually needs to happen in your business as a whole and across business functions:
Deep work: analysis, strategy, design, planning
Collaborative work: client work, workshops, problem‑solving
Decision work: approvals, trade‑offs, closes
Recovery work: admin, documentation, routine tasks
Each type of work has different demands on attention, energy, and interaction. That should drive when it happens and where it works best.
2. BUILD PERFORMANCE RHYTHMS
Then we design rhythms that reflect how humans function and how tech integrates.
This aligns directly to what Jha's and Brown's research identifies: stress and constant switching shrink attentional capacity, and the antidote is deliberate structure that protects focus windows and builds in recovery.
These lighter blocks and transitions need to be intentional lock‑through time—not just scrolling or zoning out, but active recovery practices that clear cognitive residue between domains.
It's also accountability shared. These processes are transparent, observable, and measurable.
3. LET LOCATION BE THE LAST DECISION
Only when the work and rhythms are clear and mutually shared, do we touch environment:
Which work genuinely benefits from being in the same room?
Which work is better in a quiet, interruption‑light environment?
When do clients need you 'on', and when can the team tuck into deep work?
What rituals and transitions does the individual need to get in the optimal state?
The environment becomes a tool to support human performance and is specific to your business. It also better enables accountabilities without time tracking.
MOST PEOPLE DON'T KNOW WHERE THEY LOSE TIME
In sport, even elite athletes need coaches to see what they cannot see themselves. The same is true at work. Most people cannot accurately answer:
Where did my focus actually go today?
How long did it take me to switch between tasks or meetings?
What helps me reset quickly when I get stuck or distracted?
Which transitions between domains are the hardest for me?
What cognitive and emotional state should I be in for certain tasks?
How do I shift into those specific cognitive and emotional states?
Without that insight, 'flexibility' can just mean more opportunities to leak energy in more places.
WHAT WE DO: BUILDING ATTENTION DISCIPLINE
Part of the work we do is helping leaders and teams:
Notice their own patterns, trades, and time‑leaks
Learn simple disciplined active recovery/resets
Build personal start and stop cues
Train lock‑in and lock‑through rituals
Understand their cognitive and emotional states, the drivers, and the ways to adjust them
Build clear transitions and pattern interrupts to drive productivity, task completion, and consequent intrinsic satisfaction
These are small habits, but together they decide whether flexible work feels like freedom or fatigue.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO COPY THE MARKET TO STAY COMPETITIVE
Yes, flexible work is now a real expectation.
Yes, the costs and constraints for business owners are real too.
You do not have to choose between:
Saying 'no' to flexibility and losing good people
Saying 'yes' to every trend and losing performance and organisational impact
You can design a third path: a flexible work system that is authentic to your business, grounded in human performance and human sustainability, and clear enough to hold accountabilities.
Just like any other skill — communication, leadership, technical capability — the ability to manage attention, lock in when needed, and lock through between domains is trainable. And just as we wouldn't send an athlete into competition without first training the skills their sport demands, we shouldn't expect people to optimise flexible work without first training how attention works.
At A Human Edge, we build attention discipline and transition rituals into our coaching and development work. This sits alongside our broader work in operating model design, talent concordance, and leadership depth.
Flexible work stops being a policy checkbox and becomes part of how your business performs.
If you want a more intelligent way through than 'three in, two out', this is the conversation worth having.
