Workplace Flexibility and Employee Wellbeing: A Longitudinal Study

الملخص

This study follows 1,200 employees across 14 organisations over three years to examine how flexible scheduling shapes wellbeing, retention and perceived fairness. Drawing on annual surveys and administrative records, we compare employees with stable, expanding and reduced access to flexible arrangements, including compressed weeks, remote days and self-managed shifts. Multilevel growth models show that increased flexibility is associated with lower emotional exhaustion and higher job satisfaction, with the strongest gains among caregivers and employees with long commutes. These benefits depend on how fairly flexibility is allocated: where employees believed access was granted unevenly, the wellbeing gains largely disappeared and intentions to leave rose. Manager discretion, transparent eligibility rules and team-level coordination emerged as the main conditions separating helpful policies from harmful ones. We discuss implications for policy design, argue that flexibility should be treated as a shared resource rather than an individual perk, and outline directions for research on long-term career consequences.