Flexible working: Guidance for people professionals on planning and managing

There are several different types of flexible working, some of which are illustrated below:

	Part-time working Work is generally considered part-time when employees are contracted to work anything less than full-time hours.
	Four-day week Usually this means working four days a week (or the equivalent hours) for the same pay as working a full-time five-day week. Different implementation models also exist.
	Term-time working A worker remains on a permanent contract but can take paid/unpaid leave during school holidays.
	Annualised hours The total number of hours to be worked over the year is fixed but there is variation over the year in the length of the working day and week. Employees may or may not have an element of choice over working patterns.
	Compressed hours The central feature is 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.
	Job sharing A form of part-time working where two (or occasionally more) people share the responsibility for a job between them.
	Remote working  This permits employees to work all or part of their working week at a location remote from the employers’ workplace.

Flexible working arrangements can be informal or can be formally agreed.

Hybrid working (which has been on the rise since the COVID-19 pandemic, where people work some of the time at their workplace and some time from home) is also considered a form of flexible working. More information on hybrid working can be found in our guide on managing hybrid working.

When developing or amending flexible working policies ensure that they follow all legal requirements.

To ensure that policies adapt to new ideas and emerging good practice, schedule a regular review, considering stakeholder and employee views.  

A wide range of sectors and types of work were covered in the research project Flexible working: Lessons from the pandemic. The pandemic drew attention to the distinction between flexibility of location and flexibility of hours. On the location scale, some tasks can be done anywhere, while others must be done in a specific place. On the hours scale, there are tasks that can be done at any time and tasks that need to be done at specific times. 

Interviewees reported that, if their tasks were at the hours-flexible end of the spectrum, working from home provided more opportunity to choose the timing of personal activities and work activities. However, others found that the work demanded hours like those worked in the workplace, although of course without the commute: in those jobs, the barriers that prevented hours flexibility were largely still in place when working from home.

• For those workers whose jobs prevent homeworking, resentment or unfairness may be an issue: can you improve the motivation and engagement of these workers by offering greater flexibility of hours? 
• Consider fairness across the whole organisation as well as across the team (see Skanska case study).

Within each job, work with team managers to 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.

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

• Proactively embrace a team-based approach to designing work, supporting managers to coordinate patterns of availability between team members to cover the required time slots. 
• Multi-skilling, or building 'substitutability' between team members, could help to create more flexibility of hours, even in jobs with very specific hours requirements (see Compass case study). Look to develop multiple skills and provide training to support teams to fill in and substitute for one another. 
• When teams need to cover specific hours of service, support managers to engage teams in considering options, exploring alternatives and agreeing and then rostering shifts and working patterns. Trialling new options can also support understanding of the impact of different options.
• Make it a management responsibility to talk to people about their flexibility needs – maybe at annual review or budget time – rather than reactively waiting for individuals to make requests. Particularly in hours-dependent types of work, this gives people a framework for thinking through the options that work for your organisational needs.
• Work with managers to build in an understanding of everyone’s preferred working patterns. Present this as a discussion opportunity and manage expectations about what is possible. Where the work allows little flexibility of hours across the team, find out what everyone’s preferred requirement is – the thing that would make the most difference to them and their lives. 
• Wherever teams need to share the cover of operating hours, invest in team rostering software and apps that give individuals as much input as possible into their working patterns. Individual input is critical for creating work-life balance in these environments. 
• Be clear about the degree of formality involved in any change to flexibility, and whether this is a permanent arrangement or a change to terms of employment. 

Organisational culture and context are essential factors in achieving success when implementing flexible working. Support from key individuals within the organisation is part of this, with both senior leaders and HR seen as key players. 

A range of cultural factors are important for flexible working, for example having a culture that: 

• supports and prioritises flexible working
• encourages listening to employees and making flexible working easy to request
• empowers and encourages employees to seek flexible working 
• avoids stigmatising flexible workers 
• communicates consistent messages about the value the organisation places on building understanding, awareness and momentum around flexible working.

Our case study and action learning events research with Affinity Health at Work highlighted a variety of flexible working benefits for both individuals and organisations. Communicating these to employees, managers and leaders can help create momentum and enthusiasm for flexible working.  

CIPD members can access the full write up of the action learning research through the knowledge archive.

For the organisation

• Retention and recruitment: Flexible working was reported to help with recruiting and retaining a broader pool of talent, reducing recruitment costs (due to lower attrition) and retaining employees’ skills. Being able to recruit and retain employees in this way can lead to financial gains and a potential competitive advantage for the organisation.
• Employee engagement and loyalty: Flexible working can be linked to higher employee engagement, leading to employees being more likely to be flexible for and loyal to the organisation. 
• Positive influence on work performance: Flexible working can increase productivity and quality of work, with employees working more efficiently, and organising and managing their workload better.
• Employees going above and beyond: Employees can feel more motivated to work hard and to give back to the organisation (for example training other staff).
• Avoiding negative employee outcomes: Enabling people to work flexibly can prevent work-related stress, reduce sickness absence, and avoid other negative employee outcomes (such as an inability to manage work and personal life commitments effectively).  
• Workforce in line with needs: Flexibility enables employers to balance their workforce in line with the organisation’s needs.  
• Diversity and inclusion: Flexible working contributes to organisations having a more diverse workforce, inclusive of people from different backgrounds, gender, and so on.  

For the individual

• Health and wellbeing: Having the ability to work flexibly can enhance general wellbeing and have other health benefits. 
• Positive impact on attitudes and relationships: Flexible working can give employees greater control and choice over their work, generate positive feelings about their job and organisation, and create more positive manager-employee relationships. 
• Balancing caring/non-work responsibilities with work: Flexible working allows employees to take on caring responsibilities without having to give up working and helps employees stay in work who might have otherwise had to leave.
• General work-life balance: Flexible working can enable general improvement in work-life balance, reduce commute time and increase time spent at home. 
• Flexibility for life’s emergencies: Flexible working gives employees ad hoc flexibility to deal with emergencies when they arise. 
• Flexibility for life’s interests and commitments: Flexible working allows time to engage in interests outside of work. 

While giving general information on benefits is helpful, it helps to take a targeted approach and look for hooks and business imperatives that are particularly compelling within your organisation and context. For some organisations, this is about attraction, recruitment, and retention, for example, being seen as an employer of choice in a competitive market or overcoming industry skills shortages. For others, diversity and inclusion is a more compelling reason. 

The key areas to consider when building a business case around flexible work include:

• Being an employer of choice in a competitive market.
• Overcoming industry skills shortages.
• Closing the gender pay gap. 
• Dispel myths, share successes and build communities.

You may find it useful to refer to the CIPD’s checklist for building a business case for flexible working.

Several approaches can gain manager buy-in, some of which are about communication and sharing information, while others are about support and education. 

Communicate benefits

Signposting the potential benefits of flexible working is key to gain manager buy-in. These can include:

• Recruitment and retention benefits: Showing how flexible working can support recruitment and retention and widen the talent pool, particularly when there is a skills shortage in specific sectors or roles.
• Financial benefits: National statistics and measures within the organisation can be used to build the business case for implementing flexible working. Flexible working can also be positioned as a way of ensuring budgets are used more efficiently and staffing is in line with the organisation’s needs.

Share successes 

Examples from those who have successfully implemented flexible working can gain buy-in from managers. This is particularly important for those who have had a previous negative experience of flexible working.

Examples of organisations sharing success stories are available in our flexible working case studies.

Provide specific support for managers

Some managers may need additional support: 

• Help managers learn from other cases of flexible working: Ensure that learning is captured and transferred from the implementation of flexible working elsewhere in the organisation (and beyond), both what has worked well and what has not worked so well and why, so that managers learn from previous successes and mistakes. 
• Support managers with job design: Help managers think through what flexibility can be provided in jobs/roles that appear harder to make flexible; explore the range of types of flexibility (hours, location, timing of work); make sure people are not asked to do full-time jobs in part-time hours.
• Offer formal learning and development. Some aspects of people management, such as performance management, communication or supporting new starters, may need to be adapted for flexible workers. Engage managers about their specific development needs and how they can be met. 
• Make resources and informal training/coaching available: Resources could take the form of practical toolkits or you could provide training and coaching to help managers understand how to make flexible working work in their team.  
• Provide guidance to managers around flexible working in particular business areas: There may be some areas of the business which have roles that are seen as harder to make flexible. Specific guidance and training for managers in these areas can help to support them when thinking about transitioning into more flexible ways of working.  

Make use of the flowchart to help you gain buy-in from managers.

You can also refer to our guide for managers on managing flexible working.

Here are some ideas to inspire creative ways to offer flexible working.

Flexible fortnight

A publishing organisation recently introduced “Flexible fortnight”, an initiative which aims to encourage employees to trial their ideal flexible working arrangement and encourage the uptake of flexible working across the organisation. Flexible fortnight was based on four options: non-standard start and end times; working from home; reduced working hours; and working from another office. Following the initiative, employees were able to make formal flexible working requests if they wished to do so and data collected from Flexible fortnight will be shared for future learning. 

Team-managed flexible working schedules

A construction company uses a flexible working rota within a project team (16 team members): each week one member of the project team takes ownership for the weekly rota and team members pick a morning where they can come in late or an afternoon where they leave early (flexitime). The general culture on a project site was described as “we don’t watch the clock either”, so that employees feel they can be flexible if needed.

Flexible bank of nurses

An NHS trust operates an internal flexible “bank” for nurses. People who do not want a substantive contract, want to choose when they work, or want to be paid weekly instead of monthly, can choose to work as part of the “bank”. These people are not contracted for particular shifts, they just work when they can work and when the work is available.  

Split shifts and job-shares in customer-facing roles

In a car rental organisation, branches and depots are being encouraged to be creative when it comes to flexible working: for example, implementing split shift options and job-shares. Some branches have deliberately extended their hours to enable more shift working, thereby creating a win-win for both employees and customers. 

Flexibility and homeworking in call centres

A pharmaceutical company offers flexible working in their customer services team, which needs to provide 24/7 support to clients. Customer service employees can pick specific shifts that work for them, such as a mixture of early and late shifts. Some customer service staff are also enabled to work from home, through the use of online portals that provide access to internal and customer systems, allowing them to respond to customer needs. 

There can be challenges in finding tangible ways of measuring the direct impact of flexible working, especially when considering more informal flexible working arrangements. However, some insight can be gleaned from previous CIPD research on how to measure the impact flexible working has on organisations, teams and individuals. These can be grouped as: 

• quantitative measures
• qualitative measures 
• other processes for evaluation.

Numerical information routinely collected throughout the year could be used for evaluation purposes; data could also be gathered specifically to evaluate flexible working. 

Employee surveys

Surveys can be used to measure the impact of flexible working and to look at areas such as wellbeing to see whether flexible working influences these outcomes. Questions might focus on views on flexible working, work–life balance, wellbeing, engagement, and diversity and inclusion. Comparisons to explore the impact of flexible working could include: 

• comparing flexible workers with those not working flexibly 
• comparing data from before and after implementation of flexible working to understand the impact and employee/manager opinion. ‘It [bi-annual survey] allows me as a manager to know where to focus on the team...’ 

HR and performance metrics 

Measures such as recruitment, staff turnover, sickness absence data, health and safety metrics, KPIs (for example revenue and deliverables), mental and physical wellbeing, and exit interview data, can be used to compare employees who are working flexibly with those who are not. In addition, measuring travel time saved and expenses saved can be useful to calculate, as well as other strategic measures (for example whether flexible working is making a difference to the gender pay gap). Organisations can also look at how well teams meet their project timetables and financial targets. 

Pre- and post-evaluation using flexible working data and other metrics

Collect baseline and post-intervention data on flexible working and other measures to understand how implementation of a flexible working initiative or pilot influences the uptake of flexible working (across different areas of the business) and whether it leads to changes in other outcomes, such as retention and absence rates. For example: 

• before and after measures relating to whether teams were meeting organisational/business needs and targets and monitoring behaviour changes through their IT system (that is, the number of emails sent/received, and so on) 
• diversity in recruitment and promotions (that is, applications, shortlist and successful candidates) before and after flexible working can be explored
• snap surveys run before and after a flexible working pilot or initiative can help gather data specifically about it and can be used to seek the views of important stakeholders, such as clients as well as team members and employees.  

Various types of qualitative data could be used for evaluation. Again, some of these are data that would be gathered routinely, others might be gathered specifically for flexible working evaluation.

Performance reviews 

Performance reviews can be used as a way for both parties to reflect and talk through whether flexible working is working well and whether any changes need to be implemented. Everybody has appraisals and objectives, so you could say, during the pilot, are the appraisal objectives being met? And, if not, is this because flexible working is not being as efficient as it should be?” 

Continued project/team productivity

Having a continued level of productivity in particular projects or in particular business areas following the implementation of flexible working can be a way of showing that the impact on business outcomes is minimal or positive. In some organisations this could include tangible sales measures/targets or customer service reports; in others it may be more subjective measures of productivity (for example, project outcomes remaining stable). 

Formal feedback from the individual, manager, team and clients 

Gathering employee and manager feedback following a flexible working pilot or initiative is important to understand the impact and learning gained. Gathering feedback from the flexible worker’s team and peer group can help managers and those implementing flexible working to understand whether the flexible working arrangement is impacting on the individual’s output or their team. If there are concerns about performance and flexible working arrangements, managers can seek formal feedback from the team, anonymously. Gaining client feedback is another potential measure of impact. 

Ask about impact on culture 

The positive impacts that result from a flexible working initiative may be culture shifts, such as reducing the stigma around requesting flexible working and encouraging the uptake of flexible working. These may be gathered through opinion surveys or more ad hoc feedback. 

Other processes may also be adopted to evaluate the success of, and capture learning from, flexible working. 

Initial discussions and follow-up check-ins 

Having discussions early on and check-ins allow the manager and employee to create shared understanding of the flexible working arrangements and allow them to talk through any impact on the employee’s workload and performance. 

Capture learning through a trial period 

A trial period can allow both parties to consider whether flexible working is working, what has gone well, and what hasn’t gone well, to capture learning. If there are concerns that flexible working may have a negative impact, a trial gives the flexible worker a chance to find ways to mitigate this. 

Case studies 

Gathering case studies can highlight the successes, learnings, risks and benefits. While the evaluation that case studies provide is largely anecdotal, they can show the need for further systematic evaluation and support decisions on measures to be used. 

Steering group 

Having a steering group that meets regularly can help monitor progress as well as enable ownership and explore learning. It can also support conducting a more systematic evaluation. Involve employees from specific groups such as parents, carers or employees with disabilities.  

You can make use of the CIPD's measuring and evaluating the impact chart to help you assess the impact of flexible working initiatives in your organisation.

When responding to requests for flexible working, try to bear the following in mind:

• Outline the process for making requests (both formal and informal) in a relevant policy. Make sure managers are trained in this process.
• Respond as promptly as you can and be aware of any legislative requirements regarding the timing of responding to requests.
• Try to fully consider requests and explore other options if it’s not possible to agree.
• Encourage managers to treat a flexible working request as a dialogue rather than a yes/no decision.
• Use trial periods to test out flexible working arrangements.

This guide is based on two earlier guides; one from 2019 produced in collaboration with Affinity Health at Work and the other from 2021 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.