Neha Thethi explains how employers can mitigate the risk of rejecting applications
When it comes to flexible working, employers get very focused on whether they can say no. They can. The real question is whether they can explain why. Office attendance and the continuing argument about who actually needs to be where have made flexible working harder to treat as routine HR admin.
Since April 2024, employees have been able to make a statutory flexible working request from their first day in a job. Employers have to deal with requests reasonably, speak to the employee before refusing one and make a decision within two months.
That doesn’t mean every request has to be accepted. Employers can still refuse for one of eight statutory business reasons, including extra cost, problems reorganising work or recruiting staff, and concerns about performance, quality or customer demand. Where things go wrong is when it looks as though the answer was always going to be no, and the reason was found afterwards.
Take office attendance. A business might decide staff should be in three days a week. Fair enough. But it cannot simply point to that rule and knock back an individual flexible working request. You still have to look at what the person is actually asking for and whether it would really cause a problem. If it would, what problem? Is there another way of making it work? ‘The policy says so’ is not much of an answer if no one has properly looked at the request. And if the exact proposal...
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