A new law making it quicker and easier for people to request flexible working comes into force in April. But for all the legal tweaks, I wager the most important learning for managers who want to sail through the new legislative changes and make a success of flexible working boils down to just two things, and neither is in the Act itself.
As a brief reminder, the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act, which comes into force in England, Scotland and Wales on April 6, 2024, will reduce the time managers have to consider and respond to a request from three months to two months, including dealing with any appeal. It also means that if managers want to refuse flexible working, they must first ‘consult’ with the person, ie. discuss the request and its potential impact in-person.
In addition, the Act will give people a ‘day one right’ to ask for flex, doing away with the current need to have been with your employer at least 26 weeks before you can legally ask for flexible working. This latter change is unlikely to give rise to very many requests from existing staff, nor indeed from new recruits, as long as employers take the initiative both to advertise the potential flexible working in any role being recruited, and also proactively to discuss options at interview. As with all things flex, thinking ahead and thinking clearly makes it so much easier to manage.
Clear objectives and the problem with trust
Although it will be important for your managers to understand the forthcoming legal changes, what is much more important is to ensure they are confident about their role in creating a positive culture around flexible working.
There are in fact only two things you need to ensure that your managers can do:
• Set out clearly and measurably what staff members have to do in their roles.
• Ask the staff member to consider how best they will deliver – which could involve some choice and control around where and/or when they do the work.
It is common for flexible advocates – like me – to talk about how the key to unlocking the benefits of flex is for managers to trust their staff. But what is very clear, listening to managers in different industries and sizes of organisations, is that this is often distinctly counter-cultural. What managers are looking for are rules, boundaries, guidelines that help them navigate the ‘what ifs’ of staff management and flexible teams.
Trust, in many settings, unfortunately feels like a leap of faith. One that exposes the manager to too much risk, personally and professionally. And that they may feel also exposes their organisation to too much risk.
Where to start?
Instead of that risky-feeling leap of faith into trust, I propose a different starting point. One the manager themselves can control, and for which they can seek support and additional training if they do not feel completely confident in their own abilities.
Namely, that every manager must be able to set out clearly and measurably what their staff member is expected to do in their role.
The question that follows from manager to direct report is, tell me what will enable you to best meet these expectations? This hands at least a degree of choice and control to the worker, who may have proposals around varying where or when they carry out their work.
Where choice and control are present for the worker, improved engagement and performance can generally be found too.
The manager’s responsibility is to monitor the staff member’s outputs and outcomes. If there are any problems with performance, this is the point to revert to the manager’s first responsibility – clarity about what’s needed – and as part of the review, to sense check against that how and where someone is choosing to work. It may be that time or location is contributing to unsatisfactory performance; or something else entirely may be at issue.
Whatever your policy around flexible working, its successful implementation is down to confident and skilled line managers. The important learnings are that performance is measured against clearly defined expectations, and that the manager has no need to micromanage time spent in the office.
And from successful delivery, regardless of flex working patterns, perhaps trust will come.
First published in People Management on 20 March 2024
