Work in 2025 is, well, different than it used to be. More companies are demanding that workers come back to the office — sometimes full-time — yet more than one-third of employees still work away from the office at least once a week.

Another trend has popped up as well, especially among remote and hybrid workers: Voluntarily working in fits and starts, as long as you get the work done. “Microshifting” can bring welcome flexibility, but does it lead to an always-on trudge toward burnout?

Jared Pope is a benefits and employment law attorney and CEO of Work Shield, a tool for companies to handle workplace harassment. He recently joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio to discuss the rise of microshifting and how companies should best handle it. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Let me see if I understand this right: microshifting. It's like working in fits and starts, as long as you get the job well done. Is it something like that?

Jared Pope: Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of this growing practice where employees may have short bursts of working and then they'll go do something else. Like, hey, they're going to spend a couple of hours and go work, and then they're gonna come back and do another sprint or burst throughout that day. And so instead of the traditional 9 to 5 as we may know it, it may be across 7 to 7, but you're going to have different bursts of productivity from these individuals.

Brancaccio: This isn't just a wonderful amenity to make lives easier for people who have multiple commitments. I mean, it can go wrong, right? You can end up putting in lots of hours at all hours, just not all strung together into an eight- or nine-hour shift.

Pope: That's right. If you think about the individual that may wake up early, they work that three or four hours. They take off two or three hours to go run the kids to daycare, run the errands, do whatever they need to do, and then come back on, what that sometimes leads to is this sense of "I'm always on. I'm always having to be on. I'm worried about, did I miss an email? Did I not miss an email?" So it could lead to this idea or emotional feeling of, "Geez, I feel like I'm always on," which leads to burnout.

Brancaccio: Any tips for if you're managing a company that wants to do this so that it doesn't lead to the wrong outcome?

Pope: Well, you have to modernize your policies. No. 1: With these flexible schedules, you have to make sure there's explicit reference to microshifts, so the digital interactions, the asynchronous communication between the employee and the manager or the supervisor. That's No. 1. No. 2: You're going to have to make sure you deploy some form of tools that ensure 24/7 accessibility — monitoring or understanding what that person's doing.

Brancaccio: And what are your thoughts on actually training managers so they understand how to optimize this microshifting?

Pope: It should be No. 1 in your playbook. You have to train your managers. That means you have to teach the leaders how to spot the risk of working remotely or in this microshift, OK, how do you solicit that feedback? How do you see when underperformance is happening, or even overperformance? But then also training them how to maintain that connection. And with that, that training should come in also and say, "Hey, how are you going to keep the rhythm of your culture? How are you going to keep that heartbeat of your culture so it doesn't fragment?