Work in the future / Should we work fewer hours?

PippaWould you like to choose which hours you work?

ChungYou had to either give up being a good mum or a good parent, or you had to give up your very lucrative career. Now, with flexible working, you could do both. But the question is at what cost?

PhilToday we're talking about flexible work and whether set working hours are a thing of the past.

PippaHello and welcome to Learning English for Work, the podcast to help improve your business English. In this series, we're looking at the big forces shaping the world of work today and asking how our jobs might change in the future. I'm Pippa.

PhilAnd I'm Phil. Find a transcript for this episode at bbclearningenglish.com.

PippaSo, Phil, I know you've worked both as an employee with the same hours every week, and you've also worked freelance, where I imagine you could choose a bit more when you worked. Which do you prefer?

PhilWell, if we're talking about working hours, it's definitely better being freelance because you can arrange your work around things you have in your day, so it sometimes means you can get involved in different projects, or you can meet friends, or you can do things, and then you just make sure you get the work done at another time. And so having that complete flexibility, that's definitely better.

PippaHmm. Interesting. But I suppose you always have to worry about where the next job comes from, where your work's coming from, when you're freelance.

PhilYes. That's true.

PippaWell, in recent years, it's become more common for companies to offer flexible working. So that way you get the flexible hours that you might have when you're freelance, you get to choose more the hours that you work, but you're still an employee, so you can still get some of those benefits. So we're going to be looking a little bit more at this in this programme.