Reading the Room · Flexible Working
“Because We Said So” Won’t Be a Reason Much Longer
If your attendance policy had to be reasonable, evidenced and explained, would it pass?
By Juli Oliver-Smith FCIPD · 4 min read
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
14 October 2026
Three days in the office? Fuel prices are rising again, and more people are doing the sums on what their office days actually cost them. A Mobilityways survey of UK commuters earlier this year found people were working from home an average of 1.7 days a week but would like 2.6 – and 45% of petrol and diesel drivers said rising fuel costs had already affected their commute.
When I wrote Three Days in the Office? You’re Starting With the Wrong Question, my argument was that the number was the wrong place to start. Start with the work, and the right pattern follows. That piece drew more conversation than anything else I’ve posted, and the debate clearly hasn’t gone away. It has simply picked up a new question: who pays for the commute?
Now the law is about to ask a version of the same question.
What’s changing
Since April 2024, employees have been able to make a flexible working request from their first day in a job. The Employment Rights Act 2025 goes further. Once the changes take effect – expected in autumn 2027 – an employer will only be able to refuse a request where it is reasonable to do so for one or more of the statutory business reasons, and will have to explain why they consider the refusal reasonable. They will also have to consult the employee before refusing a request outright.
Acas is consulting until 17 December on an updated Code of Practice to reflect this. Employment tribunals have to take the Code into account where it’s relevant, so it matters what it says. The draft sets out four principles for reaching a reasonable decision:
- Base it on evidence.
- Adapt to make the request work where you can.
- Work it through together.
- Be transparent and consistent.
Read those again with your own office policy in mind. If the honest answer to “Why three days?” is “Because that’s what we decided”, that may be a harder case to make when someone asks for a fourth day at home to cut the cost of their commute.
The team, not just the request
One part of the draft caught my eye in particular. It asks employers to think about the combined effect of several requests within a team, and to discuss existing arrangements when they consider new ones.
That’s the right question – but you can only answer it if you understand the work. What genuinely benefits from people being together? What doesn’t? Where are the peaks and troughs, and who does the work depend on? It’s the question I kept coming back to in my Work Before Structure series. Without it, every request is judged in isolation, and the decision tends to rest on gut feel or precedent rather than evidence.
What I’ve seen work
I’ve relied heavily on flexible and part-time working in my own teams, particularly in employee relations, where you want to keep good people. My most flexible team was around 90% women balancing work and family – I hope that’s becoming just as true for men.
Because we designed for the whole team, with flexible contracts and people able to increase their hours with notice, we could absorb the peaks and troughs of ER casework. It worked because the team knew I’d back them, and they knew the model had to work for the businesses we supported. Flexibility wasn’t a favour granted to individuals. It was part of how the team was designed to deliver.
What I’d be doing now
Autumn 2027 sounds a long way off, but these changes touch policy, management capability and data. A few things I’d start on now:
- Test your attendance policy against the four principles. Could you explain, with evidence, why each role needs the pattern it has?
- Understand the work at team level, not just role by role, so you can judge the combined effect of requests.
- Prepare managers for the consultation step. A conversation about how to make a request work is a different skill from approving or declining a form.
- Record decisions and the reasons for them consistently, so you can show the reasoning if it’s ever questioned.
None of this is new good practice. The difference is that it is about to become the standard a refusal is judged against.
So, a question for employers: if your attendance policy had to pass a “reasonable, evidenced and explained” test tomorrow, would it?
Related insight
- Three Days in the Office? You’re Starting With the Wrong Question.
- If You Can’t Manage Someone Remotely, Is Remote Working Really the Problem?
- Flexibility Isn’t a Gen Z Thing. It’s a Human Thing.