Employees now value work-life balance more than money

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The tug-of-war persists: in-office days versus working from home. Leadership preferences versus employee preferences.

Resume Builder reported last October that 30% of companies will eliminate remote work in 2026. According to a survey of business leaders by Vena Solutions, a private financial software company, 83% of CEOs globally anticipate a return to full-time office work in 2027.

But what if there’s a better way to frame this conversation? What if the focus shifts away from where employees are working to when employees are working?

This year, the real battle for talent may not be about remote versus in-office work — it’ll be about time autonomy.

Work-life balance has overtaken salary and compensation as the leading priority cited by 65% of office workers globally, up from 59% four years ago, said Peter Miscovich, co-author of the book The Workplace You Need Now, and the executive managing director and global future of work leader at JLL, the commercial real estate giant.

Employees increasingly value control over when they work such as start and stop times, protected focus blocks, and predictable personal-time boundaries, more than additional workplace location choice, Miscovich said.

“This shift towards time autonomy is happening because workload intensity and meeting volume have risen dramatically, making calendar control and time management the most immediate desirable lever to improve employee work effectiveness, individual wellbeing and to improve overall workforce performance,” Miscovich said. “Time autonomy also reflects real-life demands like caregiving (children, aging parents, spousal/partner care, etc.) meeting school schedules, and sustaining health routines that work location flexibility alone doesn’t solve effectively.”

Miscovich’s view is increasingly echoed by HR leaders, founders, and workforce researchers who say flexibility has matured past conversations around location.

Time autonomy is rising in value because it gives people control over energy, not just location, said Mohit Ramani, CEO and CTO of Empyreal Infotech, a software development and digital solutions agency.

“Interest in location is fading. What matters now is working at the right time. That change reflects a work environment built around cognition rather than presence. When output depends on judgment rather than presence, control over time matters more than a desk,” Ramani said. “Many leaders still frame flexibility as a remote versus office question. That misses how work is actually experienced. Employees naturally move between thinking, coordinating, and recharging. Flexibility works when it respects that rhythm. When leaders focus on where work happens, they overlook the damage caused by interruptions and unnecessary alignment.”

Leaders may look at work flexibility as a policy, but workers experience it as daily friction on bad days, or relief on good ones.

“Flexibility is reduced when teams are locked into early meetings and calls, followed by back-to-back nonstop daily meetings, time-zone-insensitive scheduling, or an expectation for instant employee email responsiveness,” Miscovich said. “Employees are often asking for increased work from anywhere flexibility combined with greater work time autonomy with the permission for greater work time predictability, including the ability to reschedule, decline, or go more asynchronous without incurring any career penalties.”

JLL’s Workforce Preferences Barometer reveals that employees broadly accept office attendance policies (72% view them positively), yet 40% of those with negative views believe they'll be less productive if unable to choose their preferred work setting, Miscovich said.

“The real issue isn't location resistance but the lack of autonomy over daily schedules, particularly critical for the 48% of workers who identify as caregivers and need flexibility for short-notice paid leave (42%) and hybrid arrangements (43%),” he said.

Time autonomy need not result in chaos, but no matter what, it’s going to stress systems, especially ones that have been in place for as long as anyone can remember.

There are things to look out for.

“The biggest operational challenge is maintaining reliable coverage with ‘clean team handoffs with seamless transitions’ and ‘no dropping of the ball’ across team workflows while avoiding the always-on culture norm that simply migrates the stress of work into the evening shift and for working over the weekends just to catch up from a full week of daily nonstop back-to-back meetings,” Miscovich said.

Companies tend to struggle when approvals and key decisions stall because the right people are not available at the same time, creating hidden queues and increasing cycle-time drag as well as critical workflow interruption and work process disruption, he said.

“The most effective operating models define core team collaboration hours, articulate response-time expectations, provide clear escalation paths with clear ownership and accountability for time-sensitive work,” Miscovich said.

In a world where time autonomy is the norm for working professionals, teams must also rethink KPIs due to work happening across staggered hours and asynchronous schedules.

“Leaders should shift toward a greater focus upon setting clear business outcomes and workflow metrics such as cycle time, throughput, quality, rework, customer impact, and decision turnaround time,” Miscovich said. “A practical approach is to map the work, identify the critical path, instrument the workflow lightly, and then keep only the critical KPIs that support real work outcomes that will be most meaningful.”

The future of work is allowing specialists within your organization to operate autonomously, said Callum Gracie, founder of digital marketing firm Otto Media Group.

“The companies still wrestling with ‘when should people work’ are usually the ones holding onto hierarchies that no longer serve a purpose,” Gracie said. “The real question for 2026 isn't flexible hours versus fixed schedules. It's whether you flatten the organization and let specialists run autonomously, or keep paying for a coordination layer that's already becoming obsolete.”

If we do see a total focus shift from ‘where’ to ‘when,’ what is the physical office for?

“When flexibility centers on time rather than presence, the physical office must transform from a mandated workspace location to a desirable employee destination based on human-centered workplace design, exceptional technology enablement and an employee-magnetic preferred workplace experience offering,” Miscovich said.

Employees will choose the office when it reliably delivers better collaboration, learning, belonging, and focus than home-based work locations, he said.

“The real differentiator for the office value proposal is not based upon square footage; it’s the choreography of workspace, technology, and human rituals that turn in-office days into high-performing, delightful employee experiences,” Miscovich said.

A defining leadership skill in this work future is the ability to provide clear direction and clear communication to all team leaders.

“Teams need to be given clear and often ‘brutal’ priorities, with clear decision rights, and clear definitions of what is to be done that will travel effectively across asynchronous hours and time-autonomous conditions,” Miscovich said. “Leaders also need to model the time autonomy with boundary-respecting behavior, because the leadership after-hours patterns of behavior often quickly become the cultural default for everyone else within the organization.”

At Thrive Local, a software provider and digital agency, leaders were intentional about defining work delivery expectations upfront when they converted from fixed schedules to one offering schedule autonomy to their employees.

“Everyone understood what an acceptable outcome looked like before work began—not after it was reviewed,” said Matt Bowman, the agency’s founder and CEO.

“After that rebuild, average cycle time moved from 9.5 business days to 6.2, handoff-related rework dropped by 29% and weekly completed work increased from 41 to 56 without extending working hours,” Bowman said.

Prior to the change, the team had lost the ability to work efficiently because of two disruptive habits: drive-by check-ins and ad hoc status nudges, he said.

“The team started to work more efficiently after they began to implement structured context for execution instead of requiring leadership presence to maintain productivity,” Bowman said. “The time autonomy which we established as an operational benefit turned out to be our most advantageous resource.”