Work flexibility on self-employed

Adapt your schedules to the needs of your clients

Being self-employed can sometimes be hard, but there are undoubtedly great advantages and satisfactions. Work flexibility to offer a better service to your clients and adapt to their schedules and needs, and, at the same time, to be able to reconcile it with your personal life, is undoubtedly one of them.

A challenge, but also a gift

Flexible working is the ability to choose, design and/or adapt the characteristics of your work and your business to your clients and your life, and is embodied by being able to choose where you work from, how much time you spend and your working hours. The main benefit of flexible working is being able to find a true work-life balance without losing out on business opportunities. 

Does this "tailor-made" work mean working less or not fulfilling your commitments to your clients? Certainly not, because it is about efficiency and profitability without sacrificing quality of life. 

Time is a scarce commodity, both for you and for your clients, so being accessible and available, knowing when is the best time to contact them, being able to take the initiative to anticipate their needs and knowing how to react to unforeseen events without affecting your agenda and the rest of your services, as you know, are the main challenges of a freelancer.

Advantages of flexible working

In addition to favouring the conciliation with the personal aspect and having a better quality of life, relying on flexible working hours to carry out your business has the following advantages: 

- It generates greater job and professional satisfaction.

- It allows for more efficient time management and increased productivity.

- It helps to control stress by having greater control over the workload at all times. 

- Improves the ability to react to emergencies and unforeseen situations. 

- Allows to take on greater work challenges and new projects. 

- It can help reduce costs by optimising travel and maintenance costs of workspaces and other resources.

How you can adapt to your customers

If you want to offer a good service and enjoy all the benefits of flexible working, here are some recommendations: 

- Listen to your customers and analyse the information they give you to understand their needs and see how you can improve your service to them. If you need to know more, ask them and take the initiative!

- Reference each customer's schedule to schedule your own, set up meetings and/or make business calls. 

- Maintain continuous and effective communication by anticipating information on all processes to build trust. Always insist on your availability to resolve doubts and understand their concerns. 

- Lean on technology and digital automation to optimise resource management, work from anywhere and be available to your customers when needed. Virtual switchboards are perfect solutions to project a professional image with a fixed business telephone that you can answer wherever you are. 

- Establish clear limits in terms of opening hours, policies, rates and protocols for dealing with emergencies or unforeseen events to avoid misunderstandings or conflictive situations. 


Although it may sound demanding to adapt your schedules to those of your clients, the reality is that it helps you to organise your work better, concentrating your efforts and focusing on communication with them when necessary. The International Labour Organization's Working Time and Work-Life Balance Around the World report states that by analysing the way working hours are structured and the average length of working days, it is possible to achieve a good performance for the company while maintaining work-life balance. It also shows that longer working hours are associated with lower productivity. 

Are you considering extending work flexibility in your business? From Rinkel we encourage you to find a way to adapt your working hours to the needs of your customers and thus offer a better service, increasing your turnover and experiencing the great satisfaction of a job well done and making your customers happy.