When I recently read a media report about Owl Labs’ September 2025 survey that introduced the term “microshifting,” I had to laugh.
Finally, the corporate world had discovered what working mothers and carers have been doing out of sheer necessity for decades. Only now, they’ve provided a trendy name, packaged it as an innovative workplace trend, and are now celebrating the “discovery” that work does not have to happen in a single, uninterrupted 9-to-5 workday block.
The process of “Microshifting” is breaking work into smaller periods of activity interspersed with non-work tasks like private appointments, fitness and self-care activities, school runs, or meal preparation, isn’t new. Rather, it’s long been a form of survival.
For working mothers and carers, microshifting is the invisible choreography we perform daily, often apologetically, as we try to prove we are just as committed as our colleagues who do not have to negotiate the competing demands of caring responsibilities and professional deadlines.
My workday, over the course of my career since becoming a parent, has never looked traditional. At times l have started at 7:30am to accommodate afternoon school pickups. I have logged off at 3:30pm, shuttled children to sports practice, prepared dinner, and then logged back on at 8pm to finish what needed doing. This wasn’t innovation; it was necessity born from the reality of doing ‘life’ as a parent and carer.
The statistics bear this out. Women continue to shoulder the majority of unpaid domestic work and caring responsibilities. We are not just juggling work and life, we are juggling paid employment with a second, unpaid shift that society still expects us to manage seamlessly and invisibly. When corporate surveys celebrate “microshifting” as a pathway to better work-life balance, I wonder, balance for whom?
Do not misunderstand me, I am grateful that flexible work arrangements are finally being recognised and legitimised in mainstream corporate work environments. The hybrid work environments that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic have made “microshifting” more viable and less stigmatised. When I can take a Zoom meeting from home, log off to drive my children to their after-school activities, and return to finish a project proposal, I am more productive and less stressed than when I had to choose between professional commitments and family obligations.
But let’s be honest about what work-life balance actually means for most working women.
It is often less about protecting mental health or finding time for yoga (though those things matter), and more about desperately trying to keep all the balls in the air—the project deadline, the parent-teacher interview, the dinner that needs cooking, the elderly parent who needs checking on. It is about managing complexity and challenge, not achieving some Zen state of perfect equilibrium.
As an experienced HR manager, I have seen firsthand how flexibility and trust can transform workplaces. We should not care what hours people work, provided they meet their deadlines and attend necessary meetings. If someone logs off at 3:30pm and chooses to log back on at 8pm, that is their prerogative. Outcomes matter more than optics. Yet too many organisations still measure productivity by time spent at a desk where managers can see you, rather than by actual results delivered.
Women will ultimately benefit most from widespread acceptance of “microshifting”, but only if we have forward-thinking employers and HR departments willing to genuinely embrace this approach. Insisting that people return to the office full-time signals a fundamental lack of trust in employees’ ability to achieve their KPIs. It suggests an outdated belief that presence equals productivity, when evidence increasingly shows the opposite.
Hybrid work allows the flexibility to ‘micro shift’, balance competing demands, and still interact meaningfully with our teams. It is simply a different way of working that we should embrace in 2026. The technology exists. The productivity data support it. The only missing ingredient is organisational courage and commitment to move beyond traditional models.
The Owl Labs survey found nothing new. It simply gave a name to what working mothers and carers have been pioneering for years, often at significant personal cost and with little recognition. So now that “microshifting” has been identified and studied, it’s time we stopped treating it as an accommodation and started recognising it as good business practice that values outcomes over outdated presenteeism.
Working women have been showing the way all along. The real question is whether organisations, managers and HR departments are finally ready to catch up.