Managing menopause transition in the workplace: The double-edged sword of flexible work

Despite a growing body of literature around menopause at work, our understanding of how menopause symptoms may impact employees over time is limited. Using a longitudinal sample of 679 cis-women, we predicted that the changes in the severity of psychological and physical menopause symptoms would lead to changes in burnout and perceived job performance over a period of 6 months. Drawing from resource theories, we further explored whether the usefulness of flexible work may moderate these relationships. Our findings showed that women who experienced greater intensification of menopause symptoms experienced an increase in burnout, and women whose symptoms became less intense experienced a decrease in burnout. We also found that those who found flexible work more useful experienced a positive change in their perceived job performance, despite suffering from the intensified physical symptoms. Those who perceived such flexible work to be less useful, however, did not exhibit a significant change in their performance over time. In-depth qualitative findings on a sub-sample of 53 women provided nuanced explanations for these results, including exposing a double-edged sword of working flexibly to manage menopause symptoms and potentially detrimental unintended consequences of flexible work during menopause transition.