Guidance

Advertise flexible working arrangements in job adverts

Published 4 March 2026

Applies to England, Scotland and Wales

Purpose of this action

Advertising flexible working can encourage a wider range of people to apply for your roles, particularly women.  

You should also use job adverts to make sure all potential employees know they can request flexible working from their first day of employment. This is sometimes called the ‘day one right’.

Flexible working can include:

• the number of hours worked, such as part-time roles 
• different working hours, like compressed hours or flexi-time
• the ability to change patterns or hours at short notice 
• where the work is done – for example, working from home, the workplace, or both
• other arrangements, such as job sharing 

Benefits and evidence

Flexible working may help people with additional needs or responsibilities to stay in work. This includes:

• parents, who are more likely to be hybrid workers^{[footnote 1]}
• women returning to work after maternity leave 
• carers, who are more likely to work part-time^{[footnote 2]}
• people with long-term mental or physical health conditions
• older people 

Research suggests that flexible working patterns can improve mental health for men, while working from home can strongly benefit women’s mental health and job satisfaction.^{[footnote 3]}

By advertising your organisation’s flexible working arrangements, and promoting employees’ right to request flexible working from their first day, you may attract a wider range of applicants and build a more diverse workforce.^{[footnote 4][footnote 5]} Research suggests women are more likely to apply for jobs that offer flexible working.^{[footnote 6]} When Zurich Insurance advertised all new roles available as part-time or job-share by default, applications from women for senior roles went up by 19%.^{[footnote 7]} At John Lewis & Partners, they went up by 35%.^{[footnote 8]}

Implementing this action

To outline your flexible working policies in job adverts consider the following steps:

• highlight that every employee has the legal right to request flexible working 
• give specific examples of arrangements that work for the role, such as remote work or flexi-time 
• clearly state your commitment to wellbeing and flexible working 
• use a dedicated section in the advert to emphasise your supportive culture and benefits available

On your website you could:

• explain the process for making a flexible working request within your organisation
• share examples of colleagues who work flexibly, especially those in senior roles 
• signpost to guidance on flexible working from Acas and GOV.UK

Tracking progress

You might want to consider tracking the progress of this action by measuring: 

• the proportion of new adverts that state flexible working arrangements

• the breakdown of all applicants and successful candidates by sex – including the combination of sex and other characteristics (such as parental or caring status) to highlight specific trends for different groups of men and women

• feedback from candidates on what motivated them to apply, and how many mention flexible working

Where possible, you should compare any data you gather with ‘baseline’ data from previous recruitment campaigns.

Data privacy

Some or all of the equality information you collect is likely to be ‘special category personal data’, meaning it has special legal protections. 

Ensure that you are complying with the UK’s data protection legislation when you collect and analyse employees’ data.

Get advice and approval from your organisation’s privacy or data protection expert before you start.

1. Office for National Statistics (2024) ‘Who are the hybrid workers?’  ↩

2. Office for National Statistics (2021) The Census 2021 in England and Wales. ↩

3. Agnoletto, M. (2024) ‘Flexible working and well-being: Evidence from the UK’, Journal of Demographic Economics, 90(4), pp. 589–625. https://doi.org/10.1017/dem.2024.16.  ↩

4. The Behavioural Insights Team (2025). How to improve gender equality in the workplace: actions for employers. ↩

5. The Behavioural Insights Team (2021) ‘Encouraging employers to advertise jobs as flexible’. ↩

6. The Behavioural Insights Team (2021) ‘Flexibility by default: Increasing the advertisement of part-time or job-share options’  ↩

7. The Behavioural Insights Team (2025). How to improve gender equality in the workplace: actions for employers. ↩

8. The Behavioural Insights Team (2025). How to improve gender equality in the workplace: actions for employers. ↩