u/onlydogsmatter

I’m a little confused as my understanding was that legally, in the UK, an employer can only reject a statutory flexible working request if they have one or more of eight specific business reasons. General preferences or managerial convenience are not lawful grounds for refusal.

The 8 Statutory Business Reasons for Rejection are:

1. The burden of additional costs: The change will cost extra money that will hurt the business.
2. Detrimental effect on customer demand: The business will not be able to meet the needs of clients or customers.
3. Inability to reorganise work among existing staff: Current employees cannot pick up or share the remaining tasks.
4. Inability to recruit additional staff: The company cannot hire more people to cover the gap.
5. Detrimental impact on quality: The standard of work will go down.
6. Detrimental impact on performance: Individual or team output will drop.
7. Insufficient work during proposed times: There is not enough work for the employee to do during the specific hours they want to shift to.
8. Planned structural changes: The business is planning a reorganization or workforce change that will not fit with the requested patter

If your employer rejects your request without using one of the eight statutory reasons, they are breaking the law. In the UK, failing to ground a refusal in a statutory reason means they have not handled the request in a "reasonable manner."

So with that in mind, let’s say you already successfully wfh 3-4 days a week and have been doing so for a while with no issues on your wfh days, and you want to put in a request to be fully remote, is there anything they could do legally to reject this request?

Edit: The way some people are interpreting my responses is very interesting. I am AuDHD and from my perspective I’m not suggesting companies can’t reject these requests, I’m purely trying to understand why they would and how it’s legal.

Interesting though as typically in places of work, it’s assumed people questioning things are being combative/undermining/problematic, when actually the way my brain works is just “I need to fully understand this thing and if this doesn’t make sense based on what I know right now, I need to ask more questions to get full context”. Asking questions is not being argumentative.

It’s very typical of how people are treated at work….

Obviously this is going to vary by sector but overall, what are your expectations of your managers role at your company and - if you are a manager, what do you understand your role to be?

Is there just a fundamental misunderstanding between the manager/managed which is why people constantly get frustrated about it?

Are they there to plan, organise, review, advise, guide, train, problem solve etc. Or are they there to have an overview and then encourage the staff to do the work themselves to help them develop?

Curious to see what people in either position think.