Microshifting: The Next Workplace Challenge For Romanian Employers?

August 2026 – Flexible working is no longer just about where employees work. Increasingly, it is about when.

For the past few years, workplace flexibility has largely been associated with remote and hybrid working. Today, the conversation is shifting from where employees work to when they work. Increasingly, employees want greater autonomy to organise their working day around periods of peak productivity, personal commitments, or family responsibilities. This emerging model, commonly referred to as microshifting, allows employees to pide their working day into several separate work blocks rather than following a traditional continuous schedule.

While the concept remains relatively new, it is already attracting significant attention internationally. According to the 2025 State of Hybrid Work Report¹ published by Owl Labs, nearly two-thirds of knowledge workers expressed interest in organising their working day into shorter, non-linear work blocks, with the highest level of interest among Generation Z and millennials.

Although Romania currently has one of the lowest rates of remote working in the European Union², this should not lead employers to assume that demands for greater flexibility will remain limited. As competition for talent intensifies and younger generations increasingly prioritise autonomy over how they organise their working day, requests for more flexible working arrangements are likely to become increasingly common. Employers that are prepared to accommodate these expectations may gain a competitive advantage.

Microshifting: From trend to practice

Is microshifting an option for employers in Romania? The short answer is yes.

Consider an employee who works between 7:00 and 10:00, resumes work between 13:00 and 16:00, and then joins meetings with colleagues in the United States between 21:00 and 23:00. Although the employee has worked the same eight hours as under a traditional schedule, the working day now stretches across almost sixteen hours. This seemingly simple arrangement immediately raises a number of practical questions. How should the employer define the employee's working schedule? Does the evening work amount to night work? How should fragmented working hours be recorded? And how can the employer demonstrate compliance with the applicable working time rules?

Against this background, employers should pay particular attention to the following issues:

Defining the working time

Employers should establish clear working time parameters, including the earliest time at which work may begin and the latest time by which it must end. Within those boundaries, employees may be given greater flexibility to organise their working day, provided they continue to comply with the applicable daily and weekly working time limits. Equally important, employers should ensure that flexibility does not gradually evolve into a pattern of regular overtime, particularly where late meetings or multiple work blocks become part of an employee's normal routine.

In other words, while the working day may become more flexible, it should continue to operate within a clearly defined legal framework.

Night work should not be overlooked

For multinational employers, one of the main attractions of microshifting is the ability to accommodate meetings with colleagues or clients in different time zones. In practice, however, regular evening work may result in employees qualifying as night workers, triggering additional statutory obligations.

This will be particularly relevant for employers whose teams regularly collaborate with colleagues in the United States or Asia-Pacific. While occasional late meetings are unlikely to raise concerns, recurring evening work should prompt employers to assess whether the legal regime applicable to night work has become relevant.

Document the arrangement clearly

As working time constitutes an essential element of the employment agreement, the agreed working arrangement should be properly reflected in the employment documentation, either through the employment agreement itself or with an addendum. The documentation should clearly set out the applicable working pattern, the agreed working time interval, and any other rules governing the arrangement.

Review your working time recording system

Where employees work at different times throughout the day rather than in one continuous block, accurately recording working time becomes significantly more challenging. Employers should therefore ensure that their working time recording systems are capable of capturing fragmented working patterns rather than simply recording a single start and finish time.

This is essential not only to demonstrate compliance with the agreed working schedule, but also to verify that employees benefit from the applicable daily and weekly rest periods and to identify whether any additional hours qualify as overtime. Without reliable working time records, employers may face significant evidential challenges in the event of a labour inspection or employment dispute.

Conclusion

Microshifting reflects a broader shift in employee expectations around workplace flexibility. For employers, the question is therefore unlikely to be whether requests for this type of arrangement will arise more frequently, but how to implement it without creating unnecessary compliance risks.

Footnotes

1. Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2025 (US Report), published 23 September 2025, https://owllabs.com/state-of-hybrid-work/2025. See also the summary in CNBC, 19 January 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/19/65percent-of-workers-are-interested-in-microshifting-theirschedules-says-new-report.html

2. Eurostat, 'Average work week nearly 36 hours in the EU in 2025', https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20260527-1. On comparative working time flexibility see also Eurostat, Flexibility at work statistics, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Flexibility_at_work_-_statistics.