Can Flexible Work Policies Challenge Ideal Worker Norms and Improve Employees’ Work Outcomes? The Role of Policy Design and Implementation

This paper examines the relationship between flexible work policies (e.g., time-off, flextime, working from home), workplace culture, and employee work outcomes. Drawing on an original survey of 4,013 employees from a national probability sample of U.S. households, we find that “ideal worker norms,” which emphasize a single-minded commitment to work, largely persist across U.S. work organizations, including those that offer flexible work policies. However, in organizations where flexible work policies are implemented under certain conditions—namely, gender-neutral framing, transparent guidelines and granting processes, easy access, and strong managerial support—employees are less likely to associate “successful employees” with ideal worker characteristics and less likely to view using flexible work policies as a career limiting move. Employees in these conditions also report higher self-assessed job fit, promotion prospects, and job satisfaction, and lower turnover intentions compared to employees in organizations where flexible work policies are implemented in more feminized, discretionary, less accessible, and less supportive conditions. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of flexible work policies depends on their design and implementation, not merely their availability, and that when implemented effectively, these policies can improve workplace culture and employee work outcomes.