Imagine you lead a small team and want it to include people whose lives do not fit a nine-to-five template, such as a parent covering school pickups, a colleague managing a long-term health condition, or a specialist who does their best work in late-day focus blocks. You add the words “flexible hours” to the next job post and wait for the team to change.
It might change, a little. The CIPD’s evidence review reports small positive effects, and other studies show that the benefit depends on details most flexibility policies leave out, including who controls the schedule and who is actually allowed to use it. This article sets out what the evidence supports, where it runs thin, and how to design flexibility so that it reaches the people it is meant for.
Key Takeaways
- A 2021 CIPD evidence review of 26 studies found that flexible working arrangements and teleworking have small positive effects on diversity and perceived inclusion.
- Flexibility of time was more likely than flexibility of location to reduce conflict between work and family roles, and the favourable effects appeared when employees, not employers, controlled the schedule.
- A 2025 rapid evidence review of UK research found consistent inequalities in access to flexible working by occupational status, with some evidence of inequalities by gender, disability, geography and ethnicity.
- Future Forum survey data from 2021 show that more Black respondents than white respondents wanted flexibility in where they work, but the data are self-reported and cannot separate flexibility from everything else that changed in 2020 and 2021.
- My recommendation, based on this evidence, is to track who requests and who receives flexibility, let employees control their own schedules, and judge work by outcomes instead of presence.
Why does this matter if you want to work fewer hours?
Inclusive flexibility and a shorter work week depend on the same design choices: control over your own schedule and a manager who measures results. If you are a founder or team leader building a lean team, those choices decide whether the people you hire can sustain their work, and whether you can sustain yours.
I run my own agency on 20 hours a week after years of 16-hour days, so I have a personal stake in how working hours are designed. My experience is one case and not evidence, which is why the rest of this article leans on published research.
What does the research say about flexible work and diversity?
Research on flexible work and diversity points to small positive effects and not large ones. The CIPD reviewed the evidence in 2021 and reported small positive effects on diversity and perceived inclusion, with the favourable effects on satisfaction and work-family conflict appearing only when employees, not employers, controlled variations in the schedule.
Flexible working arrangements, a category of employment terms that let an employee vary how much, when or where they work, are the subject of most research on flexibility and inclusion. The CIPD counts teleworking, meaning working remotely from a chosen location, as one form of flexible working. Source: CIPD, Flexible working, teleworking and diversity: an evidence review (2021)
The review searched two scientific databases, found 113 studies, and kept 26 that met its criteria for quality and relevance. Every included study indicated that flexible working helps employees cope with work and family roles, with less conflict between them, but the differences were small.
The CIPD’s 2021 evidence review found that flexible working arrangements and teleworking have small positive effects on diversity and perceived inclusion. It screened 113 studies from two scientific databases and included 26 in its analysis. Source: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, Flexible working, teleworking and diversity: an evidence review, April 2021
The type of flexibility mattered, and so did who controlled it. The table below sets out what the review reported for each.
| Variable | What the CIPD review reported |
| Flexibility of time (when and how much) | More likely than flexibility of location to reduce conflict between work and family roles. |
| Flexibility of location (where) | Smaller benefit on that measure. Teleworking may hinder understanding and knowledge transfer because tone, warmth and attentiveness are harder to read through technology. |
| Employee controls the schedule | Favourable effects on satisfaction and work-family conflict were felt. |
| Employer controls the schedule | Favourable effects were not felt in the studies where employees did not control the variation. |
| Time on the job | The small positive effect on job satisfaction tends to decrease over time. |
Two further findings from the same review are worth holding onto. Women showed higher job satisfaction when their organisation offered flexible working, whether or not they used it, which suggests that being seen as a family-supportive employer carries weight of its own. The review also found a warning: among women with a baby, those who found it easy to bring work home reported worse mental health than those who found it difficult, so a flexible arrangement can blur the line between work and home instead of shortening the working day.
Remote work is one kind of flexibility, and treating it as the whole policy leaves out the kind the research favours.
Who actually gets access to flexible working?
Access to flexible working is unequal, and the inequality follows occupational status more consistently than any other characteristic. A 2025 rapid evidence review of UK research reported consistent inequalities by occupational status, with some evidence of inequalities by gender, disability, geography and ethnicity.
A 2025 rapid evidence review published in Public Health in Practice found consistent inequalities in access to flexible working in the UK by occupational status, with some evidence of inequalities by gender, disability, geography and ethnicity. The authors searched four databases (OVID-Embase, Scopus, Cochrane and Assia-Proquest) in September and October 2024 and described the evidence as limited in detail. Source: Barnes, Cartwright, Kennedy and Formby, Creating a healthier economy: a rapid evidence review of inequalities in flexible working arrangements in the UK, Public Health in Practice, 2025
The authors point to systemic causes, including occupational hierarchies, gendered norms about caring, racism, disability discrimination, a culture that rewards overwork, and flexibility stigma, the career penalty some people expect after using a flexible arrangement. For a team leader this has a direct meaning: a policy open to everyone on paper can still be used mostly by people whose role, status or manager makes it safe to ask. The review covers UK research only, so treat it as a pattern to check in your own team and not as a measurement of it.
Does remote flexibility help underrepresented groups feel included?
Survey data suggest that it can, although the data come from knowledge workers and record stated preferences and perceptions, not hiring or promotion outcomes. In the Future Forum Pulse of July and August 2021, 81% of Black respondents said they want flexibility in where they work, compared with 75% of white respondents.
The Future Forum Pulse survey found that 73% of Black respondents agreed with the statement “I am treated fairly at work” in August 2021, up from 47% in August 2020. The survey covered 10,569 knowledge workers in the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, and was fielded from July 28 to August 10, 2021. Source: Future Forum (Slack), The great executive-employee disconnect, October 5, 2021
The same survey also showed a gap in who makes these decisions. Among knowledge workers already working remotely, executives were nearly three times more likely than other employees to want a full-time return to the office, and 66% of executives said post-pandemic planning was happening mainly at the executive level, with little or no direct input from employees.
These numbers come with limits. Future Forum is a consortium launched by Slack, the sample is limited to knowledge workers, the answers are self-reported, and the rise between August 2020 and August 2021 coincides with a period when many other things changed at once. The survey cannot show that flexible work caused the change in fairness scores. The CIPD review adds a second limit, since the satisfaction benefit of flexible working tends to decrease over time. If flexibility reaches mainly people who already hold secure, desk-based roles, as the 2025 review suggests it often does, the gains measured in these studies may tell you little about the workers a policy is meant to reach.
The chain most flexibility policies assume runs from flexible hours to a wider applicant pool, then to a more varied team, and then to a stronger sense of inclusion. The sources cited here report small gains in perceived inclusion and in coping with work and family roles. I did not find in them evidence that adding flexible hours to a job post, by itself, changes who applies or who is promoted, so that middle step remains an assumption.
Which flexible arrangement fits which team need?
Flexible working covers several distinct arrangements, and each one changes a different variable: hours, schedule, days, location or the number of people holding a role. Choosing between them starts with the constraint you are solving for, such as caregiving hours, energy patterns, or client availability.
| Arrangement | What changes | What stays the same |
| Flextime | Start and finish times, within limits the team agrees on. | Total weekly hours and the shape of the role. |
| Compressed workweek | The number of days worked. | Total weekly hours, spread over fewer days. |
| Part-time work | Total weekly hours. | One person holds the role, with duties scaled to the hours. |
| Job sharing | Two people divide one full-time role. | The role remains a single position. |
| Fractional work | A specialist gives an organisation a defined portion of their time, usually as a contractor. | The need for the specialist’s expertise. |
| Remote or hybrid work | Where the work is done. | Hours and schedule can remain standard. |
Reading the CIPD result alongside this table, I would look at time-based arrangements first and add location flexibility where the work allows it. The existing posts on job sharing and on high-value part-time roles cover the reduced-hours options in more detail.
How do you make flexibility work for a diverse team in practice?
Start by tracking who asks for flexibility and who receives it, because the research suggests that access, more than policy wording, decides who benefits. Then give employees control over their own schedules and judge the work by outcomes.
Employer-set schedules do not produce the favourable effects the CIPD review describes, so a rota that assigns “flexible” hours with no input from the person working them does not qualify. A written request route may also work better than an informal one, since informal routes can favour people who feel comfortable asking, although I have no study that tests this. The flexible work arrangements negotiation guide and the request template give a starting structure for that route.
Managers need a way to judge work that does not depend on seeing people. The authors of the Harvard Business Review piece on flexible work and diversity argue that managers should be trained to lead distributed teams with trust and to evaluate employees on results instead of presence, and the approach to outcome-based employment on this site follows the same logic.
You cannot tell whether flexibility is inclusive until you can see who asked for it and who received it.
Two mistakes recur. The first is treating remote work as the whole of flexibility, even though the CIPD review found time flexibility more likely to produce positive results. The second is letting a flexible arrangement expand the working day, which is the pattern the review flagged for women with a baby who find it easy to bring work home. My working definition of a healthy result is a team in which requests and approvals look similar across roles and seniority levels, each schedule is set by the person working it, and reviews refer to deliverables.
Use these questions as a checklist this week:
- Which roles on my team have no flexibility option at all, and why?
- Who asked for a flexible arrangement in the past 12 months, and who received one?
- Who sets each flexible schedule, the employee or me?
- Do reviews and promotions rely on deliverables, or on who is visible in the room?
- Has any flexible arrangement drifted into longer working hours, and what changed?
Where should you start this week?
Pull the past twelve months of flexible-working requests and approvals into one list and sort it by role and seniority. If the approvals cluster in a few roles, the policy is working as a perk for those roles, and the fix is a change to the design of the roles left out, not a better-worded policy. If you have no records, start keeping them with the next request.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does flexible working improve workplace diversity?
Flexible working has small positive effects on diversity and perceived inclusion in the best evidence review I found. The CIPD’s 2021 review of 26 studies reported those small effects, and the 2025 UK review found that access is unequal, which limits what a policy can achieve on its own. Treat flexibility as one input among several and not as a diversity strategy by itself.
Is time flexibility or location flexibility better for inclusion?
Flexibility of time was more likely than flexibility of location to reduce work-family conflict in the CIPD review. Location flexibility still matters to many workers, as the 2021 Future Forum survey shows for Black respondents, but remote work can hinder knowledge transfer when tone and attentiveness are hard to read. A team can offer both and check which one people actually use.
Why do some employees not benefit from a flexible work policy?
Employees miss out when a policy exists but access depends on role, status or a manager’s attitude. The 2025 UK review names occupational hierarchies, flexibility stigma and a culture that rewards overwork among the causes. Employer-set schedules also fail to deliver the favourable effects the CIPD review describes, because those effects appeared when employees controlled the variation.
How can a small business tell whether its flexibility is inclusive?
A small business can test inclusion by comparing who requests flexibility and who receives it across roles and seniority levels. This is my suggested method, drawn from the access findings above, and not a validated measure. A spreadsheet with the request date, role, arrangement and outcome is enough to show whether approvals cluster.
Is flexible work the same as a 20-hour work week?
Flexible work changes when, where or how much a person works, while a 20-hour work week sets a specific total of weekly hours. The two overlap when an arrangement such as part-time work or job sharing reduces hours, but flextime or remote work can leave a full 40-hour week in place. The research cited in this article covers flexible working in general and does not test a 20-hour week specifically.
Sources & Further Reading
- Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). Flexible working, teleworking and diversity: an evidence review (evidence summary), April 2021. CIPD evidence summary (PDF).
- Barnes, A., Cartwright, C., Kennedy, K. and Formby, A. Creating a healthier economy: a rapid evidence review of inequalities in flexible working arrangements in the UK. Public Health in Practice, 2025, article 100649. doi.org/10.1016/j.puhip.2025.100649.
- Future Forum (Slack). The great executive-employee disconnect, October 5, 2021, reporting the Future Forum Pulse survey of 10,569 knowledge workers fielded July 28 to August 10, 2021. slack.com/blog/news/the-great-executive-employee-disconnect.
- Subramanian, S. and Washington, E. F. Why Flexible Work Is Essential to Your DEI Strategy. Harvard Business Review, February 25, 2022. hbr.org/2022/02/why-flexible-work-is-essential-to-your-dei-strategy.