Flexible work is formalized, but care is not so easily scheduled
As Singapore formalises flexible work arrangements, an important question remains: do our workplace policies reflect how flexible work actually happens? Here we present highlights from our recent paper published at CHI26, which examines the everyday work of balancing work and caregiving.
Since 1 December 2024, every employer in Singapore has been required to formally consider flexible work arrangement requests from employees [1]. The Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangement Requests turned flexibility from an informal favor into a formalized, documented request process. Our own workplace, NUS, has also adopted the scheme, with a request form and standardized template available through the internal HR portal [2].
This is genuinely a good thing, especially for someone in desperate need of flexibility in when and where they work because of care responsibilities at home. But if you've ever juggled work and care at the same time, for instance for a child, an aging parent, a family member with ongoing health needs, take a look at the form and you might notice something odd. The form asks you to specify which days and which hours you need to be flexible.
And that's where the question quietly opens up: Can care responsibilities really be scheduled? Can you predict, in advance, exactly when your mother will fall ill, when your child's school will call, when the medication will need to be picked up? Care does not simply end at 6pm. Some of it can be planned, but much of it spills over, interrupts, and changes without notice. And yet the formal infrastructure we've built to support flexible work assumes that care can be planned in advance.
That mismatch is where our study begins. As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers and service designers, we wanted to understand what flexibility actually looks like from inside people's everyday lives: not from the HR portal, not from policy documents, but from the kitchen tables, group chats, and improvised work corners where flexibility is actually held together.
We wanted to ask: what would it take to design policies, workplaces, and technologies that match the way care and work actually unfold, rather than assuming they can be neatly planned and predicted?
Why does this question matter now?
The question feels urgent right now, because the direction of travel isn't obviously in workers' favor. Even as the Tripartite Guidelines have been in effect for over a year, return-to-office mandates have been accelerating around the world and in Singapore [2]. The Ministry of Manpower estimates that around 80 percent of Singapore employers offer some form of hybrid work, but many now require three or more days a week back in the office [3]. Companies like Grab have rolled back pandemic-era hybrid arrangements [4]. One in three Singapore workers still report fearing stigma when they request flexibility [5].
So we're in an unusual moment: a formal policy that legitimizes flexibility, and a workplace culture that, in practice, often pulls the other way.
This tension matters because formal access to flexibility does not automatically mean that workers can use it without cost. A request may be officially allowed, but still feel risky. A supervisor may be supportive, but colleagues may see flexibility as special treatment. A policy may exist on paper, but workers may still hesitate to use it if they fear being seen as less committed, less available, or less serious about their careers.
From flexible work policy to everyday rhythm-making
This is where our recent research enters. In our ACM CHI 20261 paper, "It's Messy… But I Feel Balanced": Unpacking Flexible Workers' Rhythm-Making Practices, we spoke with 20 flexible workers in Singapore and looked across both their workplaces and their homes. We were less interested in whether their employers had said yes to flexibility, and more interested in what it actually took, day by day, to make that flexibility hold together.
For years, conversations about flexible work have been dominated by organizational concerns: productivity, efficiency, retention, KPIs. We wanted to shift the lens toward what flexibility actually feels like from inside a person's life: a life shaped not only by meetings and deadlines, but also by school pickups, hospital appointments, eldercare check-ins, household labor, emotional support, and the unpredictable needs of others.
We describe this everyday work as rhythm-making: the ongoing effort to assemble, adjust, repair, and renegotiate work and care arrangements across people, places, and institutions.
Seeing flexible work this way changes the question. The real question is not whether flexible work exists on paper. The real question is whether people have the relationships, trust, resources, and workplace culture needed to actually use it.
1. ACM CHI brings together researchers and practitioners to present and discuss work on human–computer interaction, including how technologies are designed and experienced in everyday life.
How flexible work and caregiving is experienced
In our study, flexible work was rarely something workers simply received from an employer. Instead, it had to be constantly sustained through collective effort and negotiation across both workplaces and homes. It depended not only on formal policies, but also on whether colleagues were willing to adjust, whether family members could step in, and whether care responsibilities could be shared when the unexpected happened.
Rather than a fixed arrangement, flexible work was often experienced as a set of rhythms that had to be continually held together, with workers actively reorganising their days as situations changed. While technologies supported ongoing coordination through messaging apps, video calls and calendar apps, our participants’ accounts point to a broader need to understand flexible work as an ongoing process of adaptation rather than a fixed policy arrangement. We present two vignettes as a window into how our participants experienced flexible work and caregiving, and the strategies they used to adapt and sustain their daily rhythms. To protect participants’ privacy, all names used here are pseudonyms.
Vignette 1 - Negotiating Flexibility through Workplace Relations
For Sue, flexible work depends largely on her efforts to sustain positive relations with her colleagues. A working mother with caregiving responsibilities for a child with special needs, her flexibility exists largely because her director supports her. While this flexibility allows her to manage care and work, it also puts her out of step with younger colleagues without similar responsibilities. Aware of this, she puts in ongoing effort to manage perceptions, timing messages to match colleagues’ hours, reassuring them of her availability, and negotiating boundaries carefully.
Even so, the arrangement feels fragile. She is aware that it depends on her director’s willingness: “My director might be leaving… if I don’t have somebody who believes in me then it’s very difficult.” Formal processes offer little reassurance. Existing Flexible Work Arrangement forms that expect workers to fill fixed schedules, frequencies and dates do not match with her caregiving experiences (see image below).
Despite having organisational support and mechanisms that support flexibility, this vignette illustrates how workers are also required to negotiate cultural perception. Sue’s flexibility comes with additional relational work required to sustain colleagues' willingness. Care demands cannot be neatly planned but rather addressed on an ongoing basis. This might be difficult for non-caregivers to understand if existing support tools are built on the assumption of a clear separation between work and care.
Vignette 2 - Tag-Teaming Care while Working from Home
Ari is a father of two, an eleven-month-old infant son and a nine-year-old daughter. He is also a manager at a multinational corporation that offers him a flexible work policy and a supportive culture, enabling him to spend more time working from home and to play an active role in caring for his children.
At home, caregiving is a shared effort between Ari, his wife, and their live-in domestic worker. He and his wife review their schedules and divide up responsibilities. They stay organised using WhatsApp groups to keep track of important dates and daily activities, while calendar apps help them plan ahead. They regularly plan around one another’s workloads, deciding who will work from home and when in order to support their children.
On days when he works from home, Ari relies on a “tag-team” approach to balance work and family. Every morning, he goes over his schedule with the domestic worker so they can plan the day together. Throughout the day, they coordinate closely, taking turns watching the baby and shifting responsibilities as needed for meetings, errands, and household needs. It’s a constant back-and-forth, but one that keeps everything running. In the evenings, when his wife came back from work, he could turn his focus to more demanding work “...then there is a time for my wife also to come back home. And then she takes the lead and then I again focus on my laptop. That is typically the way my day goes.”
This vignette showcases how care and work rhythms are sustained through coordinated collective efforts. Rather than being achieved through individual resource allocation, workers share and leverage resources collectively. Ari organisational support alone is not enough; he is required to actively plan in the long term with his wife and continually adjust with his domestic worker.
How Workers Sustain Work-Care Rhythms
The vignettes above offer only a brief glimpse into the stories participants shared with us. Yet even these small accounts point to something important: flexible work is rarely experienced as a stable arrangement that simply exists once approved. Rather, it is something workers must continually sustain across shifting demands at work and at home. What may appear as a workable arrangement often rests on collective effort: the support of colleagues and supervisors, the availability of family members or paid caregivers, and the many small routines and tools that help people hold things together. The following aspects highlight how workers actually sustain work and care in everyday life.
Flexibility is not simply provided; it has to be made workable. A workplace may appear flexible on paper, but that does not always mean workers have real control over their time. Open schedules and looser arrangements can create room to manage care, but they can also shift more responsibility onto workers themselves to constantly reorganize their days.
The key question, then, is not only whether organisations support flexibility, but also how they do so. When workers are left to absorb uncertainty without enough support, flexibility can start to feel less like freedom and more like managing a crisis alone.
Flexible work depends on other people. People’s time is shaped by children, parents, partners, colleagues, work schedules, transport, and the demands of daily life. This means that flexible work is never just a matter of personal productivity or individual choice. It depends on relationships, trust, and coordination across multiple lives, many of which are still not fully recognised in workplace expectations or public policy.
A great deal of labor goes unseen. What appears to be a smooth or successful flexible arrangement often rests on constant, mostly invisible effort. Workers are continually planning ahead, rearranging tasks, compensating for disruptions, and adjusting to others so that they can remain dependable at work while meeting care needs at home. When these efforts are overlooked, it can create a misleading picture of what supporting strategies flexible work requires. A better understanding of the behind-the-scenes efforts is important to unhide pressures carried by those sustaining work and care responsibilities.
Interruption is part of everyday life, not a failure of it. Many workplaces still operate as if focused, uninterrupted time should be the norm. But for workers with care responsibilities, interruption is often part of the day: a child needs attention, a parent falls unwell, a call comes from school, or a household task cannot wait. When policies and systems are built around the expectation of constant availability, they end up punishing ordinary life. Better approaches to flexible work would begin from a more realistic understanding: that people may need to pause, return, adjust, and re-enter work throughout the day. Even if these routines look messy from the outside, they are livable and closer to people's values. As one of our participants described, “Although (the routine is) very messy… but I get to spend more time with my kids…I think I can do everything like how I’m doing now… I feel quite balanced as well.” (Lee).
These aspects of flexible work offer a broader understanding of how people make care and work routines possible. It also delineates a clearer ground for working on better strategies to support families in being able to hold together their professional development with their caregiving responsibilities.
How work-care routines can be better supported
Our study shows that work and care are not neatly separated in everyday life. For many workers with caregiving responsibilities, the two are constantly intertwined. This blurring is not necessarily a problem, even if it is often treated that way. What may look messy, improvised, or constantly changing from the outside can still be a workable and sustainable way of getting through the day.
This matters because many workplace policies still assume that care can be planned, contained, and managed without disrupting work. But our participants’ accounts suggest otherwise. Flexible work often depends on people’s ability to respond as needs arise, drawing on whatever support, time, and resources they have available. From this, we offer a set of recommendations for how future strategies could better support workers with caregiving responsibilities.
- Design for care that cannot be fully planned. Care does not always happen at fixed times or in predictable ways. Policies and flexible work arrangements that expect workers to state in advance exactly when and for how long care will be needed do not reflect the reality of everyday life. Better support would allow workers to respond more easily to changing care demands as they arise.
- Recognise that workable routines may look messy. From the outside, participants’ routines could sometimes appear disorganized or unstable. Yet in context, these routines were often functional and sustainable. Common ideas of a “successful” workday still tend to assume uninterrupted focus and clear boundaries between work and home. But for many workers with caregiving responsibilities, a good day is not one that is perfectly orderly, but one in which work and care can both be held together in ways that matter to them as expressed by Lee.
- Treat flexible work as a shared responsibility. Flexible work is often framed as a personal arrangement between an employer and an employee. But in reality, it is sustained by a broader network of support that may include supervisors, colleagues, spouses, relatives, neighbours, and paid domestic workers. Future strategies should recognise this reality and reduce the burden on workers of constantly having to negotiate support on their own.
- Prioritize support for those with fewer resources. Not all workers have the same ability to sustain work and care. Some have supportive supervisors, available family members, financial resources, or enough space at home to work comfortably. Others do not. This uneven access to support creates unequal burdens. Policies should therefore be designed with those under the greatest strain in mind, rather than assuming that all workers have the same capacity to cope.
Similarly, our findings also have implications for the technologies that support flexible work. Many time management and scheduling tools are designed around predictable routines and plans made in advance, yet our participants’ experiences suggest that work and care often involve ongoing adjustments in response to changing circumstances. We explore these implications for technology design in greater detail in our accompanying research paper.
Flexible work will only be useful in supporting families in covering caregiving responsibilities if it reflects how care is actually lived. That means moving beyond policies that treat care as predictable, individual, and easily contained, and toward support that recognises the shared, uneven, and often improvised work of holding daily life together.
AcknowledgementThis article draws on the experiences of participants who generously shared their stories of work, caregiving and everyday life with us. We thank them sincerely for their time, trust and contributions.
References
[1] Ministry of Man Power. 2024. Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangement Requests (TG-FWAR). Retrieved Aug 26th, 2025 from https://www.mom.gov.sg/employment-practices/good-work-practices/flexible-work-arrangements
[2] S. Ang. 2025. NUS implements full work-from-office policy for all full-time staff. The Straits Times. (03/10/2025). Retrieved 27/06/2026 from https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/nus-implements-full-work-from-office-policy-for-all-full-time-staff-members
[3] J. Lim. 2025. Why Singapore's Return to Office Shift Is Driving Demand for Flexible Work Arrangements. Servcorp Blog. (22/10/2025). Retrieved 27/06/2026 from https://www.servcorp.com.sg/en/blog/business-networking/return-to-office-work-arrangements/
[4] J. G.-X. Ong. 2024. Grab employees required to work 5 days a week in office starting Dec 2. Channel News Asia. (24/10/2024). Retrieved 27/06/2026 from https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/grab-wfo-work-office-return-5-day-week-4699631
[5] K. del Rosario. 2026. One in three Singapore workers still fear stigma when requesting flexible work, joint PAP-NTUC survey finds. National Trades Union Congress. (08/03/2026). Retrieved from https://www.ntuc.org.sg/uportal/news/One-in-three-Singapore-workers-still-fear-stigma-when-requesting-flexible-work/