Managing flexible working requests | A guide for business compliance

The Employee Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023 came into force in April 2024, allowing your employees to request flexibility from day one of their role. They can make two requests within a 12-month period.

If you receive an application that meets all the qualifying requirements, you must consider the request in a reasonable manner and in a timely fashion and can only refuse a request for one of the eight statutory reasons. The law does not define what is “reasonable”, but examples of handling flexible working requests reasonably include:

• Meeting with the employee to discuss it
• Offering them to be accompanied to the meeting
• Giving them the opportunity to appeal

In some cases, you may readily agree to the change without engaging in a thorough discussion.

Or you may wish to arrange a meeting with the employee to discuss the request, allowing them to be accompanied by a work colleague or trade union representative. In the meeting, you can discuss the change, whether there are any issues in accommodating the request, if there are other working patterns which could be explored and the advantages, disadvantages and costs of the change for the organisation.

When you’re in the process of considering the request, it’s important to avoid discriminating unlawfully against the employee. You can do this by following the following steps.

Deal with the request in a timely fashion

Unless agreed otherwise, the application should be dealt with, from start to finish, within a period of two months from first receipt. This includes dealing with any appeals.

Agreeing to the change

If you do agree to the change, you should write to the employee to confirm the change and state the start date of the change.

You will need to think about whether you need to amend the employee’s Contract of Employment to cover this change. This should be done within 28 days after the request was approved.

It is also important to consider the implications of the change, for example, if they are working from home, you will need to think about your health and safety obligations, how they will be able to access resources, what equipment they will need, etc.

If you’re in doubt, you can offer them a temporary trial. This will allow you to see if it works in practice and if it can be a sustainable way of working.

Refusing flexible working in compliance to UK laws

There are viable reasons to refuse flexible working requests. You can reject an application for one or more of the following business reasons:

• The burden of additional costs
• An inability to reorganise work amongst existing staff
• An inability to recruit additional staff
• Detrimental impact on quality
• Damaging impact on performance
• Negative effect on ability to meet customer demand
• Insufficient work for the periods the employee proposes to work
• A planned structural change to your business

You should explain the reasons for rejecting a flexible working request in writing to the employee and be prepared to answer any of their questions. There isn’t a statutory appeal process they can make, but it’s good business practice to listen to any concerns, offering a response is a good way to show you’ve considered the request in a reasonable way.

Get support with your employee flexible working request​s

At WorkNest, we offer a complete guide to flexible working support for businesses. Complementing our expert resources, we also have expert HR and employment law specialist on hand and ready to help your business. Contact us today for support: 0345 226 8393.