Flexible working requests for all

On 30th June I’ll be welcoming the introduction of legislation providing every employee the right to request flexible working. This means a lot to me personally and will be a day when I feel a sense of affirmation of a view that I’ve held since I first became involved with the DTI Work-Life Balance Challenge Fund (WLB-CF) in 2000. As part of the WLB-CF project, businesses were invited to apply for funds to help them to promote healthy WLB within their workforce. I enjoyed supporting a number of businesses during the two years of the project who were beginning to recognise that if they could support their staff with managing their WLB this would bring benefits to the business as well as the employees themselves. Businesses began to acknowledge that WLB isn’t just about mums, but applies to all of us. I can recall even now one of the phrases that I used on all my WLB training and briefing sessions “Whether we are parents or not, we all have complex lives that we need to manage alongside our working lives.” The past 14 years have added many additional challenges into the complexity of my own life and I am grateful to be able to work flexibly in order to manage that. But in the end I achieved that by taking the decision to work for myself. So on 30th June I will be celebrating the fact that legislation is now providing a requirement for every employee to have the right to request flexible working, and for them to have an expectation that their employers will, at the very least, have to consider that request in a reasonable manner – regardless of their personal circumstances. I hope that this leads to productive dialogues about how a healthy WLB can benefit both employees and employers. The evaluation report looking at the successes achieved as a result of the WLB-CF makes for interesting reading which is just as relevant to today’s employers. It can be found here