At a recent employment seminar by Wayne Smith of Integra Legal (link is external) I was particularly interested to hear about the new flexible working rights being introduced soon. I do think that employment rights generally are too far in the favour of the employee, and in my mind this just goes a step further towards making life more difficult for business owners.
The new legislation on flexible working rights has been delayed until 30th June. Under this, ALL employees now have the right to ask for flexible and / or part time working for any reason, even if it’s to play golf on a Friday afternoon or go to the pub. Make sure you know what it means for your business.
These are things you need to know about it:
1) Flexible working could mean working from home, part time, flexible hours, term time working, job sharing and shift work.
2) Employees must have 26 weeks continuous employment
3) You have a statutory duty to consider any application for flexible working
4) Your employee has a right to appeal against your decision
5) Each employee can only apply once in any 12 month period.
6) You have the flexibility to refuse requests on business grounds – these could include:
- The burden of additional costs
- Not able to reorganise work amongst the rest or your staff
- A detrimental impact on quality, performance or customer demand
- In inability to meet customer demand
- Not enough work in the times the employee wants to work
- Not being able to recruit extra staff to cover them
- Planned structural changes to your business
Before you throw your hands up in horror, flexible working can be a good thing for your business. It may be that more flexible working actually fits what you do better, or that keeping your team happy is critical to your business success.
Lawyers I’ve spoken to don’t actually think it’s going to be a big deal, but they advise you consider each request seriously and carefully and make sure you have clear grounds if you’re not able to accommodate them.