Employment law SOS: flexible working hours
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Q I manage a small manufacturing company with just seven employees. Three of them have asked me to let them work flexible hours, but this will cause me real problems in terms of shift patterns. What are my rights as an employer?
Employees do not have a right to work flexibly. However, some employees have a statutory right to request to work flexibly. As an employer, you are obliged to consider such requests and follow a prescribed statutory procedure and timetable when doing so. There is no exemption for micro employers (i.e. those employing less than 10 employees).
The right to make a statutory request to work flexibly is currently limited to parents seeking to care for a child under 17 years of age (or 18 if the child is disabled) and certain adult carers. (The government is proposing to remove this 'carer' eligibility requirement during 2014). If one or more of your employees do not qualify to make a statutory request, you can decline to consider their requests without facing penalty under the flexible working legislation.
However, you may be exposed to claims of discrimination (in particular sex discrimination) if you reject certain requests out of hand (for example, a request by an employee returning from maternity leave to work on a part time basis).
Even if the employees have made valid statutory requests to work flexibly, you are lawfully entitled to reject their requests if you can demonstrate one of eight business grounds for doing so set out in the flexible working legislation. In the circumstances, given the size of your operation, it is likely that you will be able to successfully rely on one, and potentially more, of these reasons.
If you are able to grant one, but not all of the received requests, you could decide to do so on a first-come-first-served basis, subject to ensuring that there is no discrimination risk in adopting such an approach.
