We believe that flexible work is the future, and there are a lot of reasons why businesses need to start embracing that future now. We have already talked through the top ones, including:

• Your people want it. Many of them need it. And increasingly they are going to expect it, or they will find it somewhere else.
• It's a competitive advantage that opens up your hiring pool far beyond commuting distance from the office. It makes it easier to attract, retain, and engage diverse, top talent.
• It helps unlock potential in more of your people, fostering inclusion and leveling the playing field, which leads to better outcomes.
• It's an opportunity to move to new ways of learning, connecting, collaborating, managing, and measuring that better supports your people and your business. Knowledge work has transformed businesses, but many business practices simply haven't kept up.
• A number of companies have already started down this path, and they are seeing higher employee engagement and better outcomes as a result.

But there's another reason, too, one that we have only touched on throughout this book, but that we think is worth considering before we send you on your way: Flexible work can make a real difference in people's lives, including your own. It has certainly made a difference in ours and many of the people we have encountered while focusing on this work.

That includes Erin Defay, Vice President of HR Tech at Dell Technologies. The company introduced a flexible, outcomes-based approach to working—which they call Connected Workplace—a decade before the pandemic. (In fact, when the pandemic hit, more than 64% of Dell employees already worked remotely one or more days a week.) The philosophy behind it is that “work is not a time or a place; it's the thing you do,” according to Defay. That's a philosophy to which Defay says she owes her “career and growth.” She's an active duty military spouse who has moved five times since she started with the company, to different cities, different time zones, even a different country for a while when her husband got posted to Japan. During the same period she had two children, and her flexible schedule made it possible for her to be available to them as well as to her work, which was especially important given the fact that her partner was deployed. Through it all she's been able to continue building her career because “Dell has been nothing but supportive.” And she feels lucky given the sheer difficulty other military and so-called “trailing” spouses have in finding and keeping employment. For people in these kinds of situations, “having flexibility is life-changing,” she says, and as a result “no company could lure me away.”

For Anu Bharadwaj, Chief Operating Officer at Australia-originated software company, Atlassian, it was the opportunities for a different lifestyle that most appealed to her. Atlassian culture has always been very social and connected, so she missed her colleagues when Atlassian transitioned to remote work, but she also enjoyed the perks of being able to work from different places. “Having moved from Sydney to Mountain View in the Bay Area, I missed two things the most: my family and the beach,” she explains, “so I worked from San Diego for a couple of months. Then I worked out of my sister's house in Minneapolis for a bit, and I really appreciated the extra hours I got to spend with my nephew after my work was done for the day. Our executive team was always distributed across countries, so my work was not disrupted in any way.”

We've already told you the story of Mike Brevoort, who no longer felt like he had to travel dozens of times a year for executive meetings when Slack moved to Digital-First. And Harold Jackson, who was able to move back home to be with his family when flexible work policies finally—after years of trying—allowed him to.

It has made a difference in our lives, too. Flexible work gave Brian the opportunity to reset a balance that had been missing in his life for far too long. Over the course of more than two decades, he had made job decisions that were intended to get him more time with his family and take on more of the load of raising two kids, which often fell to his wife as the “default parent” in the relationship. But despite those good intentions, it wasn’t until recently, after Slack embraced a Digital-First way of working, that it really “took.”

For Sheela, the advice she received in business school—“to burn the candle at both ends at the expense of family and friends”—reinforced the career she didn't want to build. As a woman of color, work had always been broken for her, a place where she felt pressured to work twice as hard to make it half as far, to ignore comments made by others about whether she deserved her position, to hide the fact that, as a mother of two girls and a daughter of elderly parents, she had other responsibilities that pulled her in different directions. She was once on the brink of leaving the corporate world entirely, but now she feels like she can reclaim her power and build her work around her life, rather than the other way around.

For Helen, she never had a lot of role models early in her career to show her how to balance being a mother and being a person who wanted to continue to grow professionally—likely because there just weren't a lot of good options out there for doing so. Her first child was born just before the pandemic shut down offices, so she has luckily never needed to figure out how to be a new mom (with breastfeeding and regular baby doctor appointments) alongside navigating the old-fashioned 9-to-5, commute-to-the-office-everyday model. Instead, with both she and her husband working flexibly during the pandemic, they had a chance to build a more equal partnership in the family they were starting without having any one person feel like the “default parent” and making tradeoffs between childcare and career aspirations. Whereas they once wondered how they would handle even one child, they are now on their second and even contemplating number three!

These are just a few stories, but we've heard countless others with similar themes as we have become more and more focused on the benefits of flexible work. There is a deeply human desire in all of us to find out just what we're capable of and to really do our best work. It's a shame that so often old ideas about how work should be done get in the way of that. Because none of us are just workers after all. We're all human beings (with all the complexities that entails) who work. What we have all seen during this grand experiment that the pandemic forced upon us is that being given the power and the freedom to do our best work together can be transformative—for people and for the companies they work for.