Many white-collar jobs also prioritize time in the office. At BDO, the accounting firm, it’s especially true during tax season, when people work long hours with intense deadlines. So the company started busy-season breaks — short periods when employees can leave work and not check their phones. They’ve taken children to the zoo or gone for a hike.

“We felt very strongly that it’s during the busiest time of year when day-to-day flex is most important,” said Marcee Harris Schwartz, the national director for diversity and inclusion. “When you’re working all the time is when you make mistakes or burn out or decide you’re leaving accounting forever.”

BDO also has “go dark weekends,” when people don’t log in to their work accounts for a weekend and assign a colleague to handle emergencies. Most professional services jobs require individual workers to be responsive to clients around the clock, but Ms. Schwartz said BDO had learned that there were multiple advantages when clients relied on a team instead.

A big part of making flexibility work is convincing people they can use it. That didn’t happen at Credigy, the finance firm, until it put in a formal set of benefits, with the help of Werk, and senior executives started using them, said Kim Williams, the senior director of employee experience.

“What we’ve encouraged is that you don’t need to justify the ask,” she said. “It’s not taboo anymore.”

The biggest use of the benefit has been for caregiving, but people have also used it for volunteering, exercising or taking classes. “Working mothers maybe had a louder voice for a long time, out of necessity, but we fully believed it’s an important issue not just for women and caregivers, but for everybody,” Ms. Williams said.