Flexible working covers everything from changed hours to working from home, and requests have become far more common in recent years. Knowing how to handle them properly protects your business and helps you keep good staff who need a different way of working.

Here's what you need to know about managing flexible working requests.

The right to request

Employees have a legal right to request flexible working from day one of employment. This covers changes like reduced hours, different start and finish times, compressed hours, or working from home some or all of the time. Making a request doesn't guarantee it will be approved, but you're legally required to consider it properly and respond within a set timeframe.

How to handle a request

When a request comes in, treat it seriously and think through the practical impact on your business before responding. A few steps that help:

•        Acknowledge the request promptly and set out your process for considering it

•        Discuss the request with the employee to understand what they need and why

•        Consider the impact on the team, customers and workload realistically

•        Respond formally within the legal timeframe, whether approving, proposing an alternative, or declining

Valid reasons for refusing

You can refuse a request, but only for specific business reasons set out in law, such as the burden of additional costs, an inability to reorganise work among other staff, or a detrimental impact on quality or performance. You need to be able to explain and evidence your reason clearly, since a request refused without proper grounds can lead to a claim.

Making flexible working part of your culture

Rather than treating every request as an exception to manage, it's worth thinking about whether flexible working could become a genuine part of how your business operates. Businesses that build in flexibility from the start, where the role allows it, often find it easier to attract and retain staff, and it reduces the number of individual requests you need to manage reactively.