Strict work shifts, lasting several hours at a time, may soon be a bad dream of the past. For many workers and in many companies they already are. But does that make workers live better and be less stressed? Tom Kelley Archive (Getty Images) Sílvia M., a 37-year-old Barcelonan, mother of two children, tells us that her most productive and best-paid time slots are those from 6 to 8 in the morning and from 9 to 11 at night. He dedicates them to translation, editing and proofreading tasks, for which he estimates he earns an income of around 15 euros gross per hour. The rest of the day is dedicated to a three-hour morning shift as an administrative assistant in a management company, to the children and to her home. On Saturdays and Sundays he works “sporadic and not very well paid” shifts at a friend’s cafeteria, and some afternoons he finds time to prepare for competitive exams, although obtaining the position he has been pursuing for years seems, at this point, “a rather vain hope.” Arturo Ferreiro, 51 years old, manages a roadside bar in a town in Vallès Oriental, in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. Right now it has a “floating” staff of up to 11 waiters and cooks, almost all of them under 30 years old, who work shifts of between four and six hours a day in their establishment, some more if they have to work Friday and Saturday nights. His small army of casuals alternates half-days at the bar with studies or other jobs.
Quality time?
Ferreiro admits that he would prefer to have a more stable staff, with a maximum of three or four professionals to cover the entire service, but, as he explains to us, it is increasingly difficult for him to find young people willing to work 40-hour weeks with rigid schedules. He attributes this to a change in generational expectations: young people “no longer see hospitality as a long-term professional career, they no longer aspire to consolidate themselves in a specific location, get better shifts, assume responsibilities and obtain salary increases.” They prefer to “work fewer hours, continue training, have free time and not come to work on the day they don’t feel like it.”
Martincevic’s advice to the CEOs of the future is simple: hire the best (not the most docile, least restless or most willing to adapt to inefficient routines), offer them as much flexibility as possible, trust them and don’t waste their time.
Despite everything, this small businessman with a “traditional” mentality continues to hire “kids” of university age. And he does it because, in his opinion, they are the ones that best adapt to his current clientele and give the establishment a “happy and dynamic atmosphere, something that does not happen with the most veteran waiters.” Hence, he has resigned himself to surrounding himself with twenty-somethings with no real vocation whose main priority, even above the amount of euros they charge per hour, is to work short and flexible shifts. That of M. and that of Ferreiro are two examples, sprung at random on social networks, of the arrival in Spain of the phenomenon of microshifting. That is, microshifts. For Sílvia, subscribed to the chaotic succession of work microshifts for «four or five years», it would be about «finding a new word for the usual precariousness of work: our parents and grandparents were moonlighting, they made jobs and skittles or mended dresses at home for as much as a piece, charging black. We do microshifts and, yes, we pay our self-employed fee.» The novelty, judging by what recent studies by consulting firms such as Owl Labs or Gartner detect, would be that, at least in the United States, microshifting, that increasingly frequent commitment to short and flexible shifts, is on its way to becoming a recurring demand of workers. Especially the youngest, those of that so-called Generation Z that is beginning to join the labor market en masse. 
An office in cubicles in the nineties.Smith Collection/Gado (Getty Images)This is explained by Caroline Castrillón in the international edition of Forbes magazine. The 9 to 5 workday, that ossified residue of the Industrial Revolution that we have dragged along in the last couple of centuries, “is fading away at a forced pace.” Young professionals are beginning to consider it too rigid, incompatible, in any case, with the desire for continuous training, ambitions and life design of many of them. Owl Labs states in its latest report on new trends in the labor market that 65% of American workers aspire to increasingly flexible working hours and take this aspect into account when looking for work. Furthermore: flexibility is no longer a kind of consolation prize for low-skilled workers who cannot aspire to high salaries or the expectation of having solid careers in the medium term. On the contrary, it is a priority issue for young professionals trained in the knowledge economy. That is, the brightest and best valued segment of those that join the wheel. That is the conclusion reached by Deputy’s The Big Shift: US 2025 study. For those under 30 years of age, when shifts become smaller and more flexible, the possibilities of work-life balance and quality of life increase. In any case, we are talking about a market in which the rise of teleworking that the pandemic boosted has left a very profound impact. Although the percentage of American professionals who work full-time in offices still exceeds 63%, the percentage of those who do so from home or have adopted some hybrid formula continues to grow and now reaches 37%. Among the latter, the percentage of those who work microshifts has increased from 23% to 34%.
Is less better?
Deputy defines microshifts as work days of less than six hours and, in most cases, without a predetermined schedule. That is to say, it is not a matter of standard reduced working hours or a certain degree of discretion in entry and exit times, but rather a completely flexible way of distributing time. In the words of hybrid work expert Bryan Robinson, “we are not necessarily talking about working less, but about doing it in a more intelligent and strategic way, much more adapted to the specific needs of both the employer and the employee.” Robinson confirms that a high percentage of microshifters in the United States are young women, the demographic profile that is usually most interested in finding an optimal balance between professional career and private life. This is, the expert adds, “a change in the organization of work, a potential systemic change, which has already become very noticeable in poorly regulated sectors, such as hospitality or care, but which is growing especially in sectors linked to the new knowledge economy.” For the CEO of Deputy, Silvija Martincevic, microshifting has a transformative potential comparable to that of artificial intelligence. Companies that adapt it resolutely and systematically in the coming years «will be more competitive and will have greater flexibility to attract and retain young talent, especially female talent.» The key, as the Owl Labs report points out, is to gradually replace a system based on long and rigid days (the same for everyone), not at all adapted to the characteristics of the body and mind of human beings, with “a high degree of flexibility that allows working time to be structured around short and non-linear work blocks, adapted to the energy, responsibilities and productive capacity of each specific worker.” That is to say, we would go from a system based on inefficient and rigid rules to another of extreme elasticity, a kind of fertile chaos in which short phases of intense and, at least potentially, very productive work alternate with others of disconnection or tasks of a lower level of demand. To complete the picture, Owl Labs suggests making increasingly more frequent and “tactical” use of artificial intelligence as an assistant in which to offload routine tasks. As a complement, the consulting firm recommends that employers free their employees from unnecessary tolls, such as those endless online meetings that distract from other tasks and that often respond, according to Owl Labs, more to a psychological need for control than to truly operational reasons. Martincevic’s advice to the CEOs of the future is simple: hire the best (not the most docile, least restless or most willing to adapt to inefficient routines), offer them as much flexibility as possible, trust them and don’t waste their time. This way you will get them to stay with you and you will be able to get the most out of their talent. That is at least the philosophy of the new prophets of microshifting.