What You Need Before Launching a Flexible Work Policy
Published: 27/05/2025
Free trial
See for yourself how you can save time and money. Enter your details below for a free 30 day no-obligation trial.
If your company is shifting to flexible working, this article is for you. In it, we will discuss the essentials of a flexible work policy, where to start and how to continue improving it moving forward.
Congratulations on embarking on a journey to introduce flexibility to your organisation’s operations! After weighing down all the options, exploring the opportunities and assessing the threats, you must be excited to jump right in. However, there is one more important step left, one that sours the anticipation and the experience for many as it remains shrouded in uncertainty. Creation of a flexible work policy. Namely, what should go into it, where to start and how to make sure nothing is forgotten.
If this is the wall you feel you’ve hit, this article is for you. Although one of the essentials, flexible work policy creation, is seldom spoken about. We aim to provide a valuable resource to change the status quo and, hopefully, aid companies like yours in pinpointing the starting point and mapping their route from there forward.
As of today, there are no strict statutory requirements for flexible working in the UK. The only ones currently outlined by the law are in relation to employees making requests to be moved on a flexible work model and how they are to be handled in the event of rejection, appeal or issues with the decision period.
That said, there is little to no legal obligation for businesses to have a flexible work policy as of today. This doesn’t mean, however, that you shouldn’t have one. Even if the government does not require it, it’s a very handy tool for organisations to define their operations and have the workers adhere to those frameworks.
The first step to creating a flexible work policy is determining what it's based on or, in simpler terms, answering yourself why one is needed in the first place. With it being an internal resource, the answer should be stemming from the inside, too. Namely, from your workers and the business goals.
A flexible work policy is meant to serve your workers, first and foremost. Therefore, it needs to start with them. A good place for that would be defining your office demographics. Consider the age of your employees (millennials, baby boomers and Gen Z all have very distinct working styles), parenthood status, commuting distance and such. However, don’t base the policy on your assumptions only; rather, use them as a hypothesis. Instead, try to collect feedback from your employees directly. An anonymous survey is arguably the best way of doing it as it won’t attach names to any opinions voiced, removing the fear of jeopardising one’s workplace standing if their feedback is negative. However, depending on your general office culture, that might not be necessary. For companies where the workers feel safe voicing their concerns, a more efficient route would be a focus group.
All in all, the goal is to understand what your employees want regarding flexible work policy. Do they expect the option of working remotely, or are they more interested in compressed weekdays? Would they benefit from flexible hours? All this information is vital to start piecing together a policy that not only satisfies everyone but is also balanced in a way that doesn’t compromise your organisation’s efficiency and results. So, the first step of the framework would be defining what the expectations are and how to meet them.
The next one on the list is adding even more clarity, but this time we’re focusing on business goals your company is trying to achieve. Begin by defining success, both short and long-term. How can your business objective align with your employees' needs? Pinpoint the touchpoints by analysing which teams can thrive with flexibility, and where it will need to be more controlled. And then, you can start building from there.
A good idea is to review the current data regarding the company’s performance and how it’s aligning with the goals. Doing so can highlight the most opportune flexibility options, sometimes those you didn’t initially take into consideration. With both aspects cleared up, you will have a comprehensive list of things to add to your flexible work policy. But don’t feel married to it - if the initial setup doesn’t work as intended, you can always revisit and adjust it; or if your business goals change along the way.
With your ‘whys’ answered, it’s time to start building. The foundation of the policy normally entails regulations that cover how your team works with the inventory, the legal ins and outs in response to government regulations, and the boundaries the employees are required to adhere to.
The success of a flexible workplace heavily depends on the tools your business uses and to what extent they’re utilised. Whether the model entails working in disjointed locations, different operational hours, a mixture or something else entirely, there are gaps that will affect communication and, in turn, collaboration. The right technological setup is vital not just to filling in the gaps, but also to enhancing processes compared to their traditional counterparts. But what makes the setup ‘right’?
The obvious answer is having various solutions that directly contribute to your team’s tasks and drive efficiency. However, with how saturated the software market is and how our needs for digitisation increase with each passing day, before long, you’re bound to end up with so many tools that maintaining them will become a chore of its own. That’s why prioritising integrations is key to a flexible work policy-friendly setup. Put all your tools under one roof, and you will thrive.
On top of all, it’s important to remember that a flexible work policy is still a legal document. Namely, it defines operational rules of your company that workers must adhere to, and naturally, that entails a level of legal regulations. For example, if your teams work remotely, your new policy will need to outline the measures they’re required to take in order to protect the company’s and its clients' data, such as using a VPN or running regular scans on their cybersecurity levels.
Additionally, it covers aspects such as how time off is handled, what the requirements are for defining how often one needs to be in the office and so on. Legality and compliance are key elements of the flexible work policy, making it a valid source of guidelines that the workers agree to follow when signing a contract. Additionally, it helps companies to remain accountable and compliant with the regulations despite adopting a different work model.
Don’t expect to perfect your flexible work policy from the get-go. It will take your company some time to adjust, but this period will highlight potential gaps that will call for team training, additional support, or re-adjustments of the policy. Sometimes, all three. What’s important is to keep the communication doors open.
While policies are meant to be thought out and solid from the get-go, given that flexible working is still an innovative concept without clearly defined rules, it’s very subjective to change. In fact, it’s expected to change, hence why it’s important to include a communication and reporting framework to accommodate that easily.
A decent flexible work policy covers all the areas; it strikes the balance between employee satisfaction and productivity, promotes a healthy work-life balance and, ultimately, elevates your business’s performance. However, there are many factors that can hinder what looks like a perfect approach on paper, and it’s practically impossible to prepare for them in advance - the office culture, for example. If your workers struggle with self-management or tend to get competitive, but these things are not accounted for in the policy, don’t expect your numbers to soar. Accepting feedback, tracking the metrics and gauging the employee satisfaction are three pillars for when it comes to evaluating your policy’s efficiency and could be early indicators when the change is needed.
The first step to launching a flexible work policy is determining things that matter the most. The starting point would be identifying employee needs, namely what sort of flexibility they want and in what environment they would flourish. Instead of following solely your hypothesis, however, make sure to ask the team directly. The secondary yet still highly important thing to determine is the business goals, both long-term and short-term. A combination of these two lays the perfect foundation for a flexible work policy.
The next step is adding the next layer of the laywork, which is technology and compliance regulations that your policy will entail. A flexible workplace is reliant on digital tools to ensure the business flows as intended and prospers. Finding the right tools and training your staff how to use them isn’t just a productivity-aimed measure, however. It ties into legal considerations such as data protection, too, making both intertwined and highly important. Finally, be ready to change your policy if something isn’t working or if your team isn’t adapting well. Flexible working is still a fairly new setup, experimenting and finding your way is not wrong - it’s trailblazing.
Are you ready to launch your flexible work policy? Let’s see if Timesheet Portal fits into it.