People manager guide: Flexible working

There are several different types of flexible working. Some examples include:

• Part-time working: Work is generally considered part-time when employees are contracted to work anything less than full-time hours.
• Compressed hours: The reallocation of work into fewer and longer blocks during the week (for example a nine-day fortnight).
• Flexi-time: Allows employees to choose, within certain set limits, when to begin and end work.
• Hybrid working: Where employees spend some of their time working remotely (usually, but not necessarily, from home) and some in the employer's workspace.
• Remote working: Where employees work all of their working week at a location remote from the employers’ workplace.
• Job share: Two (or sometimes more) employees share the responsibility of a job between them.

Flexible working arrangements can be informal (agreed between managers and employees) or can be formally agreed in a contract.

Requests for flexible working should be considered in a reasonable manner and in a reasonable timeframe. 

Review your organisation's policy on flexible working and seek advice from HR if necessary. Check if there are any legal obligations you need to follow.

An informal flexible working request is different from a formal, statutory request.  A formal request normally seeks a permanent contractual change to terms and conditions of employment. An informal request would normally refer to a discussion between an employee and their manager that doesn’t lead to a permanent or formal change. This could be because the individual is only seeking a minor or temporary change. You should always check your policy on informal and formal requests.  

You should discuss any formal requests for flexible working with your HR team and follow your policies and procedures.  

Employees may undertake a range of different working patterns. For some employees, it might be the first time they have worked flexibly. You may be managing a team with flexible working arrangements for the first time. This checklist will help you manage flexible workers.

Remember, employees who are working flexibly shouldn't be treated less favourably than full-time employees, unless the employer can provide a justification for that treatment.  

You need to consider the following practical issues when managing employees who are working flexibly:

• Agreeing the new working pattern. 
• Recording hours worked. 
• Managing expectations and workloads.
• Work-life balance and wellbeing. 
• Communication.

The organisation and employee must formally agree the working pattern: specifically, when and where the employee will be working. Consider the following, taking into account the employee's job role and the operational needs of the organisation: 

• How many days or hours a week does the employee need to work? 
• Where will the employee carry out this work?
• What other commitments or personal circumstances are relevant to the hours the employee can work – for example, are they also undertaking childcare or are they providing care for other people? 

Wherever possible, the working pattern should be mutually agreed.  

If you have employees working flexibly, you may be working in a different location or at different times to them. This means clarity around performance expectations becomes critical. It is also important to ensure that any issues of underperformance are promptly addressed, and that you have regular dialogue about performance and progress.

You should schedule regular one-to-one meetings, set clear objectives, reviewing them regularly and updating them as business priorities change. You should also provide regular feedback.  

Depending on the organisation and its policies and procedures, it may or may not be necessary to formally record employee working hours. Where existing systems exist (for example, time recording software), they may continue to be used. 

Employees can be asked to formally record their own working hours or arrangements in any way that is suitable and practical for the organisation and the role they undertake. 

Whatever way things are recorded, managers must ensure that employees are not working in excess of their contractual working hours and should take steps to address it with any employee where they believe this is the case. 

It is important that employees only work the hours that have been agreed with them.  

You should: 

• Agree expectations with employees as soon as the flexible working arrangement begins. 
• Ensure that the job is designed to fit with the adjusted working pattern. Review existing workloads and tasks to take into account the changes. Depending on the nature of the job, it may be necessary to reduce workloads, provide more time to complete activities or remove some tasks from the job description. 
• Review existing formal objectives and amend them where necessary. 
• When assessing performance ensure you are assessing realistically against the objectives of the role and the hours worked. 
• Clearly communicate the new expectations and keep these under regular review. 

Employees working flexibly sometimes report that their work activity spills over into their non-working time (especially when they work from home), or that they find themselves working more hours than they are contracted to undertake. These issues can arise because of a range of factors including poor job design, a lack of boundaries between home and work, organisational culture and expectations and technology use.

Hybrid and remote workers also report challenges relating to work-life balance and isolation from colleagues. Together, this complex mix of issues mean that employee wellbeing should be high on the organisational agenda for all employers. 

Where the organisation has wellbeing support or available activities these should be highlighted regularly to all employees. Flexible workers, alongside all employees, should be encouraged to make use of them.

You can support the wellbeing of part-time employees in particular by closely reviewing workloads, adjusting objectives and targets, ensuring regular communication and regularly checking in with them. You should also be aware of the potential for part-time employees to work longer than necessary and take steps to address this if you see any signs of this occurring. 

Effective communication is essential. You must ensure that all employees, whatever hours they are working, receive relevant and timely information, and have the opportunity to be involved in team discussions. 

Consider the following: 

• Holding team meetings on days when everyone is working. Where possible, schedule work so that there is a time in the week where this is possible. 
• Where people cannot attend team meetings, ensure that they receive a separate update through an appropriate mechanism, whether this is face to face, via email or through a one-to-one meeting. 
• Set up an online space for sharing and discussion where employees can engage asynchronously if they are unable to communicate at a time when they are all working. 
• Ensure regular dialogue between managers and employees – ideally weekly wherever possible. Talk to the team about the best ways to communicate. 
• Where a whole team is working part-time or flexibly, consider setting up an informal place to communicate in order to keep in touch and foster a sense of team working. A Yammer or Teams group can work well but participation should be voluntary. 
• Consider introducing ‘anchor days’ where everyone is in the workplace at the same time or on the same day, with a focus on relationship building. 

Finally, where a team has multiple flexible workers, it may be helpful to agree some team protocols around team communication, meetings, providing updates to each other, technologies and availability and contact times. The whole team can work together to create and agree these.

You can also make use of the advice sheet download below to manage communication for those employees moving to flexible working arrangements.

For those workers whose jobs prevent flexibility of location, time flexible working can provide a valuable opportunity for engagement as well as a recruitment and retention tool.

Identify opportunities to offer greater flexibility of hours where possible. With support from your HR team, think about the following:

• Consider fairness across the team (see Skanska case study) to avoid risk of resentment or conflict.
• Within each job, analyse the tasks that can be done at different hours, and the ones that need to be done at specific hours. To maximise flexibility of hours, think about how tasks can be shared or covered at the team level as well as within jobs.
• Trial flexibility of hours, where possible, for team members and regularly review how the arrangement is going for the individual and team. Make any necessary changes or adaptations.

The ‘nature’ of the work is often used as an excuse to not offer flexible hours. However, flexibility of hours lies also in the way it’s designed. More flexibility of hours can often be created with a team-based approach to work design. 

Managers can play a role by:

• Proactively embracing a team-based approach to designing work, co-ordinating patterns of availability between team members to cover the required time slots. 
• Working with HR to develop multiple skills and build ‘substitutability’ between team members (see Compass case study). 
• To cover specific hours of service, involving the team in agreeing and then rostering shifts and working patterns. Giving people autonomy and the ability to contribute to designing working patterns is good for engagement, motivation and wellbeing. 
• Taking responsibility for proactively asking your team members about their flexibility needs – maybe at development reviews or regular one-to-ones – rather than reactively waiting for individuals to make requests. 
• Building in an understanding of everyone’s preferred working patterns. Present this as a consultation, not a right, and manage expectations about what is possible. Where the work allows little flexibility of hours across the team, find out what each individual’s most cherished requirement is – the thing that would make the most difference to them and their lives. 
• Consulting with HR about the degree of formality involved in any change to flexibility of hours, and whether this is a permanent arrangement, or a change to terms of employment. You need to understand organisational policy and impact on formal terms and conditions.

The evidence base for this guide is drawn from two earlier guides; one from 2019 Flexible working: Cross-sector insights produced in collaboration with Affinity Health at Work and the other from 2021, Flexible working: Lessons from the pandemic that was based on the research project Flexible Working: Lessons from the pandemic. 

CIPD members can access these original guides through the knowledge archive.

This guide was created with content and input from Gemma Dale, Senior lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University.