5 ways to improve work-life balance and flexibility

Before building a strategy, it helps to be precise about what these terms mean. Vague definitions lead to vague policies.

Flexible working refers to any arrangement that gives an employee control over when, where, or how many hours they work. Under UK law, this covers a wide range of arrangements: flexi-time, compressed hours, part-time working, job sharing, remote or hybrid working, term-time working, and annualised hours. Since the Flexible Working (Amendment) Regulations 2023² came into force on 6 April 2024, all employees can request any of these arrangements from day one of employment, regardless of how long they have been in post. Key employee rights under the current legislation:

• Employees can make two flexible working requests in any 12-month period (previously limited to one)
• Employers must respond within two months of receiving a request, unless an extension is agreed
• Employers must consult with the employee before refusing a request
• Employees no longer need to explain the potential business impact of their proposed change
• Requests can cover hours, times, and place of work

Work-life balance is the broader outcome: the degree to which an employee feels their professional and personal lives are in sustainable harmony. It is subjective, individual, and changes over time.

The idea of 'balance' revolves around bringing one element up where, as a consequence, the other must, therefore, be going down. This might not necessarily be good for the latter of the two. Secondly, work-life balance means different things to different people, largely based on their individual personalities and expectations from work.

This is why treating work-life balance as a fixed destination is a mistake. It is better understood as an ongoing negotiation between employee needs and business requirements, one that HR has a responsibility to facilitate.

The gap between the two is where most organisations struggle. CIPD research (2025)¹ found that while 91% of employers offer some form of flexible working, many employees still cannot access the arrangements they actually want, particularly job sharing, compressed hours, and term-time working. Closing that gap is what the five strategies below are designed to do.

The question for large organisations revolves around offering flexible working at scale without creating inconsistency, inequality, or legal risk.

• Retention risk - CIPD (2025)¹ found that around 1.1 million UK workers left their jobs in the past year due to a lack of flexible working. For large organisations, even a fraction of that figure represents a significant cost in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity.
• Generational differences - A large, multi-generational workforce needs a range of options. A single policy written for one demographic will not hold.
• Competitive pressure - CIPD found that 61% of employers believe advertising flexible working is important for attracting staff and addressing skills shortages. In a tight labour market, organisations that cannot demonstrate a credible flexible working offer will lose candidates to those that can.
• Risk of inequality - Unequal access to flexible working creates exposure under equality legislation, particularly where refusals disproportionately affect employees with protected characteristics.

Employee expectations have shifted permanently as Zoe Wilson, Director of ReThinkHR, puts it:

"We're not just happy with a salary anymore. We want so much more from our employers in terms of investment in me as a professional, employee benefits that make my work-life balance easier. The flexibility — there are so many stats saying people would take less money over flexibility. And if you've got really good family-friendly benefits, people care a lot more about that balance between work and home and whether the company does that well."

Attracting the Best Talent Webinar | Do the Best Work of Your Life Ep. 2

Whilst in this instance one size certainly won't fit all, the five strategies below explore how HR can adopt alternative and more flexible approaches to support a diverse workforce as their needs evolve.
 
Each strategy is designed to be layered. HR leaders in large organisations should treat them as components of a coherent framework, not standalone fixes.

1. Use flexible working to improve work-life balance

Flexible working is not a binary switch. It exists on a spectrum, and that spectrum shifts throughout an employee's career and life. A policy that treats all flexible working requests as equivalent (and all employees as having the same needs) will fail most of the people it is supposed to serve.

When thinking of work-life balance, it makes sense to consider it as an ever-changing goal. Sometimes your employees will happily tip the balance in favour of work; for instance, when a key project is underway or when deadlines are approaching and it's busy. Other times, it will tip in favour of life; when family commitments arise or when an employee wants to devote extra time to personal achievements, such as a sports event or charitable cause. The key to success is for HR to gain a better understanding of the breadth of staff needs and desires and then build in greater workplace flexibility, giving employees more control over their work-life balance as their circumstances change.

In practice, this means encouraging line managers to have regular, informal conversations about working preferences. Normalising the conversation reduces the formality barrier and means employees are more likely to raise needs before they become problems.

The individuality of this challenge is something HR professionals consistently highlight:

"It's making people feel that they belong - and everybody is so individual and unique. That's a real challenge. And I think it's something that's quite exciting about technology because you can start to personalise things. We get that all the time when we're looking on Facebook and get ads for things. There's really clever algorithms and actually we can work a lot smarter and utilise some of this technology to really engage and make people feel valued."

Zoe Wilson, Mastering the Employee Lifecycle Webinar | Do the Best Work of Your Life Ep. 1

ACAS guidance on flexible working [AH2.1]provides a clear framework for handling requests fairly and consistently, including how to assess requests, what grounds can be used to refuse them, and how to document decisions.

Types of flexible working available under UK law:

• Flexi-time (varying start and finish times within agreed core hours)
• Compressed hours (full hours worked over fewer days)
• Part-time working (reduced hours)
• Job sharing (one role split between two employees)
• Remote or hybrid working (full or partial home working)
• Term-time working (unpaid leave during school holidays)
• Annualised hours (total annual hours agreed, with flexible scheduling)

2. Understand what flexibility and work-life balance mean to employees

Many employees do not raise flexible working needs. In large organisations, where employees may feel distant from HR and uncertain about their manager's response, this silence is common and costly.

The solution is to make communication easy, structured, and (where appropriate) anonymous.

Popular initiatives such as free fruit and discounted gym memberships are indeed worthwhile when it comes to general wellbeing, but these don't address the issue of flexible working conditions. What individuals want is for their needs to be heard and recognised and for their employer to provide options that enable them to communicate these more clearly and adapt accordingly to accommodate them.

Pulse surveys are one of the most effective tools available. Short, frequent, and low stakes, they give HR a regular read on how employees feel about their working arrangements without requiring anyone to put their name to a formal request. HR software can automate the distribution and analysis of pulse surveys, surfacing results in real time and flagging where sentiment is shifting. For more on tools that can help you gauge sentiment of your flexible approach to the workforce, read our blog.

For formal requests, a self-service portal removes the manager as a gatekeeper. Employees can submit, track, and follow up on flexible working requests directly through their HR system, creating a clear audit trail and reducing the risk of requests being informally discouraged or lost.

This matters for legal reasons too. Since the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023 came into force, employers are legally required to consult with an employee before refusing a flexible working request. A clear, documented communication process is a legal necessity.

Access PeopleXD Evo’s self-service and pulse survey capabilities enable HR teams to manage this at scale, giving employees a voice and giving HR the data to act on it.

3. Monitor who is and who is not using flexible working options

Offering flexible working is the starting point, not the finish line. If HR is not tracking uptake, it cannot know whether the policy is working or whether it is quietly failing certain groups of employees.

CIPD research (2025) found that two-fifths of employers say only some or a few of their employees can work flexibly.

As Emma Parkin, Head of Propositions at The Access Group, notes: "60.3% of shift workers say their schedule isn't flexible if they need to change it. In an era where flexibility is a top attraction and retention tool, we're failing 6 out of 10 employees."

In large organisations, the barriers are often invisible: a manager who informally discourages requests, a team culture where flexible working is seen as a sign of low commitment, or a lack of awareness among employees about what options are available to them.

The only way to surface these barriers is through data. HR should be segmenting flexible working uptake by team, department, role type, and demographic, then asking hard questions about what the patterns reveal.

Take a moment to think about who isn't currently exercising flexible working options and whether that's because they prefer structure to flexibility. Or, if there are obstacles in the way, what changes could be incorporated to support the uptake of flexible working in future? The key thing is to offer plenty of options and make employees aware of these so that they can choose what works best for them.

The relationship between flexible working and work-life balance will differ between employees, so uptake can help HR understand which options are genuinely valuable.

4. Introduce greater flexibility to support work-life balance

Work-life balance is personal. The factors that shape it (family structure, faith, health, age, caring responsibilities, commute distance) vary enormously across a large workforce. A flexible working strategy that only accounts for parents with young children will leave a significant proportion of employees without the support they need.

Think beyond obvious family commitment and health activities and consider other elements such as faith or age, as these too will impact the personal drivers behind each individual need or request. Adjusted start and finish times are valuable for employees managing school runs, but they are equally valuable for employees observing prayer times, managing chronic health conditions, or caring for elderly relatives. Compressed hours benefit employees with long commutes as much as those with childcare commitments. Term-time contracts are not just for parents. They can also support employees who are studying or who have seasonal caring responsibilities.

ONS data from autumn 2024³ shows that more than a quarter of UK working adults (28%) were following a hybrid working model, with commuting cost and time cited as a significant driver. For employees in high-cost commuting areas, even two days of home working per week can make a material difference to their quality of life and their likelihood of staying.

For large organisations with diverse workforces (including shift workers, field-based staff, and office-based employees) a single flexible working policy will not serve everyone. HR should work with operational leads to identify which types of flexibility are feasible in each part of the business and be transparent with employees about what is and is not available in their role.

5. Use people data to build a flexible working strategy that evolves with your workforce

The most effective flexible working strategies are living frameworks, built on continuous data and feedback loops that allow HR to spot problems early and adapt before they become retention issues.

Using the people data gathered in your HR system puts you in a much better position to provide a more personalised approach to work-life balance, which in turn promotes greater engagement and loyalty whilst helping to get it right for each individual, including those occasions when the organisation needs them to go that extra mile and the balance is tipped slightly more in the company's favour.

The people data that matters most includes:

• Absence rates: a sustained increase in short-term absence in a particular team can indicate burnout or unmet flexibility needs, not just illness. Learn more about tracking absence data in our blog: Visualising your Absence Data.
• Pulse survey results: tracking sentiment on working arrangements over time reveals whether changes are landing or not
• Flexible working request volumes and outcomes: are requests increasing? Are refusal rates rising? Are certain types of requests being consistently declined?
• Turnover data: segmented by team, role type, and tenure, this can reveal whether flexibility gaps are driving departures in specific parts of the business
• Performance data: used carefully, this can help HR make the case that flexible working does not harm productivity and, in many cases, improves it

For large organisations, aggregating and analysing this data manually is not feasible. HR software is the infrastructure that makes a data-driven flexible working strategy possible.

"By marrying analytics and AI, you can spot patterns you'd never see day-to-day — cold spots in onboarding, leadership gaps, or structural issues. You can quantify the cost of these problems and show the savings from fixing them. That turns HR into a trusted advisor at the board table."

Oli Quayle, AI Evangelist, Access Group, Onboarding Brilliantly Webinar | Do the Best Work of Your Life Ep. 4

Access PeopleXD Evo brings absence tracking, pulse surveys, flexible working request management, and people analytics together in one platform, giving HR teams a single, real-time view of how their workforce is doing and where action is needed.

Organisations already using this approach report a meaningful shift in how HR operates. Sonya Nevin, HR Data and Technology Manager at PTSB, reflects on the role technology plays in supporting their people strategy:

"We're committed to promoting a healthy work-life balance at PTSB, and when we found out about the PeopleXD mobile app's capabilities, we knew it would support us with reinforcing this culture."

Sonya Nevin, HR Data and Technology Manager, PTSB

When HR can demonstrate, with evidence, that a new flexible working initiative has reduced absence or improved retention in a high-turnover team, it becomes far easier to secure board-level support for further investment.

We've learnt that there's no single approach that can satisfy the desires of all employees concerning work-life balance. However, by taking the time to understand needs on a case-by-case basis, HR can better support both its people and the organisation at a time where flexibility and productivity have never been more crucial.

The five strategies in this article are designed to work together. Each one makes the others more effective, and all five are more achievable when HR has the right technology in place.

The Flexible Working (Amendment) Regulations 2023 have raised the bar for every employer in the UK. HR teams that treat flexible working as a compliance exercise will find themselves managing requests reactively, missing equality risks, and losing people to organisations that have made flexibility a genuine part of their culture. Those that treat it as a strategic priority, backed by data and supported by technology, will be better placed to attract, retain, and get the best from their people.

Ultimately, flexibility and work-life balance go hand in hand: giving employees greater choice over how and when they work can help them find a balance that suits their individual circumstances.

See how Access PeopleXD Evo helps HR teams manage flexible working requests, track people data, and build a more flexible workforce.

Sources:

1 - Flexible and hybrid working practices in 2025 | CIPD

2 - The Flexible Working (Amendment) Regulations 2023

3 - Home - Office for National Statistics