Flexible working

What is flexible working?

Flexible working is any arrangement that lets an employee change when they work, where they work or how many hours they work, compared with the usual pattern for their job. Part-time hours, flexitime, compressed hours, job sharing and working from home are all forms of it.

In Great Britain, flexible working is also a legal term. Every employee can make a statutory request for flexible working from their first day in a job, and the employer can only refuse it on one of eight business grounds set out in the Employment Rights Act 1996. US federal wage-and-hour law has no such right: the Department of Labor states that the Fair Labor Standards Act does not address flexible schedules, which makes them a matter of agreement between employer and employee.

Most flexibility is agreed without any procedure at all. A manager who lets someone start an hour later during the school holidays has agreed flexible working too. What differs is how permanent it is. An informal arrangement can be ended again, while an agreed statutory request becomes part of the employment contract.

In a shift business the question looks different from an office. Hardly anyone in a shop, a kitchen or a care home can work from home, and opening hours are fixed. Shift work already flexes for the employer, because hours follow demand. Here the arrangement runs the other way and gives the employee a say in which shifts, how many hours and which days off.

Flexible work arrangement examples

The UK government names nine types of flexible working, and term-time working is a common tenth. The table shows what each one changes and how well it fits a team that works in shifts.

The best-known form of compressed hours is the four-day week: the same weekly hours over four longer days. It suits shift workers when a longer day still leaves enough rest before the next shift, which rules out a late close followed by an early opening.

Shift teams also have two forms that rarely appear in these lists. With self-scheduling, employees pick open shifts within limits the manager sets, such as a minimum number of people per shift. With shift swapping, two colleagues trade a shift and the manager only approves the trade. Neither changes anyone's contract, and for many employees they solve the problem a formal request was meant to solve.

Flexible working in a shift team: an example

Take a shop with eleven sales staff, open from 8:00 to 20:00, Monday to Saturday. Sara works 36 hours a week on a rotating pattern with every other Saturday and two late shifts a week. When she comes back from parental leave, she asks to work four shifts from 9:30 to 15:00, Monday to Thursday. That is 22 hours a week, with no Saturdays and no lates.

The request takes 14 hours a week out of the schedule, plus her share of Saturdays and late shifts. Before the meeting, the manager looks at the schedule rather than at the request alone:

• Coverage. Which hours does the request leave open? Here: the opening from 8:00 to 9:30, the afternoons, two late shifts a week and every other Saturday.

• Who could take them. Two part-timers have asked for more hours before, and one colleague prefers late shifts.

• What the rest of the team gives up. If Sara's Saturdays all go to the same two people, the request solves one problem and creates another.

The manager offers a six-week trial. Sara works her four short shifts, the two part-timers each take 7 extra hours a week, and Sara's Saturdays are spread over the other ten people on a rotation. That adds one Saturday every twenty weeks per person. After six weeks they look at coverage at opening time together and decide whether the change becomes permanent.

Had nobody been willing to take the extra hours, "inability to reorganise work among existing staff" would have been one of the statutory grounds for refusal. That ground holds up far better when the schedule shows the manager actually tried.

How has the increase in flexible work arrangements affected workers?

For employees the gains are easy to name: more control over their time, room for childcare or study, and a better work-life balance. For employers the picture is mixed, and in shift work both sides of it show up in the schedule first.

What employers gain

The clearest gain is keeping people. Someone who can start at 9:30 instead of 8:00 stays, where they would otherwise have left after parental leave or when a parent needed care. Flexible hours also widen the group you can hire from: students, carers and people with a second job often want exactly the short or irregular shifts a business finds hard to fill. And a fixed later start is easier to plan around than repeated last-minute absences when childcare falls through.

What it costs

Every agreed arrangement becomes a fixed point the schedule has to work around. One or two are easy to absorb. When a third of the team cannot work Saturdays, the busiest day of the week rests on the people who never asked, and that is where resentment starts. Planning also takes more time, because each new schedule has to respect more individual limits. The problems usually described for remote work, such as isolation and blurred working hours, affect only the office roles in a shift business.

Handling flexible working requests: the UK rules

Since 6 April 2024, every employee in Great Britain can make a flexible working request from their first day in a job. The rules that matter for the employer:

• An employee can make two statutory requests in any 12-month period, but not while an earlier request is still being dealt with.

• The employer must consult the employee before refusing a request.

• The decision, including any appeal, has to be made within two months of the request, unless both sides agree to a longer period.

• A refusal must rest on one or more of the grounds in section 80G of the Employment Rights Act 1996.

Those grounds are the burden of additional costs, a detrimental effect on the ability to meet customer demand, inability to reorganise work among existing staff, inability to recruit additional staff, a detrimental impact on quality, a detrimental impact on performance, not enough work during the periods the employee wants to work, and planned structural changes.

If the employer agrees, gov.uk says the contract should be updated as soon as possible and no later than 28 days after the request was approved. From that point the new pattern is part of the contract, and changing it back needs the employee's agreement, like any other contract change.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 adds that a refusal must also be reasonable and explained. In November 2026 that part was in force only for making regulations, not yet for requests themselves. Northern Ireland has its own legislation on flexible working, with different conditions.

Writing a flexible working policy

A written policy saves a manager from inventing the process each time a request comes in, and it keeps decisions consistent when two people ask for the same Saturday off. For a shift business, a good policy covers at least:

• who can ask and how, including the informal route for short-term changes such as a few weeks of later starts

• who decides, and the timeline the business follows within the two months

• how requests are weighed when several people want the same shifts, for example in the order they arrive

• trial periods and the date on which an arrangement is reviewed

• how an agreed change reaches the contract and the schedule

• who hears an appeal

The Acas Code of Practice says there is no statutory right of appeal but calls offering one good practice, and it suggests discussing a trial period when it is unclear whether an arrangement will work. Acas also publishes template letters for requests and outcomes.

Making flexible working work in the schedule

An agreed arrangement usually goes wrong months later, in the schedule. A request that was fine in March becomes a problem in July, when the holidays start and the arrangement is still in someone's head instead of in the plan. What helps:

• Set the minimum staffing per shift first, so every request is judged against the same numbers.

• Record each agreed arrangement as a fixed availability, so it shows up every time a schedule is made.

• Publish the schedule a few weeks ahead, which gives people with fixed arrangements and those without the same certainty.

• Review the arrangements every quarter against the busy periods coming up, before a gap appears.

For shift-based teams, flexibility mostly lives in the rota. With employee scheduling in Shiftbase, staff share their availability and swap shifts with a colleague in the app, and you approve the change instead of rebuilding the schedule.