Flexible Working Act – What it Means for Employers

• Employees will be able to make two requests for flexible working in any 12-month period instead of just one.
• Employers will have two months to respond and must consult with employees before coming to a decision.
• Employees will no longer have to explain the impact of their request on their role and how it would be handled. The responsibility to consider the impact will fall on the employer.

It’s well known that working parents/carers, especially women, regularly sacrifice elements of job satisfaction in exchange for flexibility. In 2021 the Global Institute of Women’s Leadership, King’s College London, Working Families and University of East Anglia conducted extensive research in this area. That briefing, Working parents flexibility and job quality: What are the trade offs? surveyed working parents, in various situations, to assess the compromises they were required to make at work to ensure the flexibility their caring roles required. The findings revealed that flexible working came at a steep price, in some cases creating barriers to achieving “job quality” represented by job security, financial security, and career progression as well as low morale, increased stress and unconscious bias.

“Crucially, for employers and policymakers, these new data expose barriers that prevent parents from achieving job quality. These are many and varied: from gendered assumptions about part-time working that devalues it, to weak knowledge among managers of flexible working arrangements.” – Executive Summary, Working parents flexibility and job quality: What are the trade offs?, Global Institute of Women’s Leadership, King’s College London, Working Families and University of East Anglia

All these “job qualities” are generally agreed to be elements that go towards making a job “decent, fair and conducive to workers’ wellbeing”. So, creating barriers to these is bad news for those workers, but the failure to deliver these job qualities will also adversely affect the companies employing these flexible workers, where failing to nurture and develop a wide range of talent and experience already in house will affect the bottom line.

The research identified the barriers to achieving job quality as:

• Business Needs
• Unsupportive Cultures
• Lack of knowledge amongst line managers

Which leads me to ask the question, what can employers do to create the right environment in the spirit of the legal changes and also enhance productivity and employee loyalty?

• Upskill Line Managers. The report notes that having a supportive manager was one of the main things keeping many flexible workers in their jobs. Empowering managers with the skills to offer this informal support, in parallel with implementing formal policies and procedures appears to be one of the magic ingredients to successful flexible working.
• Work to change mindsets that have ingrained negative attitudes towards part-time workers, or gendered assumptions such as “men don’t have childcare responsibilities” or that “mothers are not interested in training or career progression”.
• Design jobs from the beginning to be flexible unless there is a really strong business case for it not being possible.
• Improve the process for flexible working requests and ensure transparency for all the stakeholders involved.
• Don’t use unsubstantiated business needs to refuse requests. Provide evidence to support refusal where it is unavoidable and proactively research other flexible working options that might work as a compromise.
• Genuinely reconfigure workloads. Once flexible working is agreed, a failure to genuinely reconfigure workloads to fit with the employee’s new schedule only increases the pressure on them. This is known as the “flexibility paradox”.
• Open dialogue. Ask working parents and carers what they need and value at work, don’t just assume you have the answers.

The research, Working parents flexibility and job quality: What are the trade offs? is full of further insights into the paradox of flexible working and the pitfalls for employees and employers alike when there are barriers to job quality. It’s an eye-opening read and contains crucial insights for organisations in the run up to the change in law.

If you are currently implementing a new flexible working policy in line with the changes in the law, LEXi can help you upskill your people leaders. Our expertise in leadership and performance development means we are ideally placed to equip line managers with the tools and confidence to have supportive, well-informed conversations with their teams.