Are you aware of the potential impact to your business of proposed changes to the law on flexible working?

As a business owner, particularly the owner of a small-to-medium-sized business, you need to start preparing to receive a flexible working request now, before you actually receive one.

Flexible working requests require a lot of business planning to determine how you might accommodate them. If you can’t accommodate them or you can only partially accommodate them, then you need to know how to respond to the employee making the request in the right way.

Since that earlier article, the Government has launched a consultation on whether the right to request flexible working should be given to an employee from their first day of employment, rather than after they have completed 26 weeks’ continuous service with you.

It is important to stress that this is a proposal for employees to have the right to request flexible working from the first day of their employment, not to actually be allowed to work flexibly from the first day of their employment.

I have worked with various employer clients during my career.

Some have tried their best to accommodate flexible working where they can. One client, a school in one of the London Boroughs, consulted with its employees who worked flexibly on at least an annual basis, to determine whether those arrangements were still effective. It also showed some leeway to the current rule on a qualifying employee only making one flexible working request in any 12-month period.

Other employers have not felt that flexible working would work well within their business, often without even trialling it. When that happens, it is an added part of my job to try and understand why so that this can be properly communicated to the employee without simply declining their request.

Often, the only reason that flexible working has been avoided is because the employer purely wants employees to be in the workplace, where their activities can be closely observed.  This is not an adequate reason for declining a flexible working request; there has to be more substance to why it is cannot be agreed to.

Then, linked to the scenario immediately above, a global pandemic arose where many employers had little choice other than to pack employees off to work from home (sometimes with a mobile phone and a laptop) to continue working there.  Some found it to be a struggle, whereas others embraced it very well.  It was an unavoidable test of whether flexible working truly worked or not on a variety of levels, from business efficacy at one end of the scale to mental health at the other.

The new proposals on changes to the law on flexible working are stated to be focused on making the UK an attractive place to work. They therefore include a review of the existing law and proposed changes to that law, including:

1. Reviewing and possibly amending the eight existing business reasons for declining a flexible working request (again, see the link above);

2. Requiring an employer to actually suggest alternatives to the working arrangements requested by the employee, in a genuine effort to explore how flexible working could work in the business;

3. Changing the administrative process behind considering and responding to a flexible working request. In particular, the proposals look at whether the three-month deadline for responding to a request is still viable; and

4. Exploring whether flexible working could be requested on a temporary basis. For example, if an employee has suddenly and unexpectedly become disabled, then a limited run of flexible working might help them when it comes to adapting to the changes that this will likely cause to their daily life.

These proposed changes to the law start to recognise that flexible working is not a “one size fits all” situation and that the law needs to encourage proper collaboration from both employers and employees to ensure that changing lifestyles and working practices can be accommodated to attract the best employees and to ensure that businesses are profitable.

Therefore, don’t be the employer who simply says “No!” to evolving ideas that could encourage greater happiness amongst your employees and better profits for your business.

email: RHiron@setfords.co.uk
website: www.setfords.co.uk/our-people/profile/richard_hiron/