Workplace wellbeing
Workplace wellbeing: does flexibility work in practice?
What do flexibility and new technology mean for everyday working life? Recent UK reports raise practical questions about availability, workload and sustainable performance.
By Matt Marney ·
Can someone in your team step away for a personal appointment without feeling they need to keep checking their phone?
It is a simple question, but the answer can tell you something useful about workplace wellbeing.
An organisation might offer hybrid working, provide wellbeing resources and encourage people to look after themselves. The everyday experience still depends on workload, expectations and how managers respond when someone needs flexibility.
Two reports published in November raise useful questions about how we organise work and what we expect from people.
What the latest research tells us
British Social Attitudes analysis published by the National Centre for Social Research on 3 November compared workers’ experiences in 2025 with 2015.
Job satisfaction fell from 81% to 74%. The proportion reporting opportunities for advancement fell from 35% to 26%.
Among managerial and professional workers, the proportion finding it difficult to take an hour or two off for personal matters increased from 25% to 36%.
These are changes over a decade. They do not establish that hybrid working caused declining satisfaction or reduced flexibility. The report also cautions that changes in survey methods may affect comparisons between occupational groups.
For me, the practical question is whether the flexibility described in a policy is something people feel able to use.
Working from home can still mean being constantly available
Consider someone who saves an hour commuting but now spends that hour answering emails. Or a parent who can collect their child from school but feels obliged to respond to every message while doing it.
These are examples of how flexibility might operate in practice. Changing where someone works leaves plenty of other decisions to make.
How quickly are they expected to reply? Who covers urgent work when they are unavailable? Can they protect time for a task that needs concentration? What happens when their workload exceeds the hours available?
Those details deserve a place in the wellbeing conversation.
A useful starting point is to ask your team:
“Can you step away for a personal appointment without feeling you must remain available?”
Then explore what makes that easy or difficult. The answer may point towards unclear expectations, inadequate cover or a manager whose behaviour unintentionally discourages people from switching off.
AI also raises questions about capacity
The Bank of England’s November Monetary Policy Report, published on 5 November, found evidence of only a modest AI-driven increase in UK productivity growth so far.
It also noted that recent productivity gains associated with restrained hiring cannot continue indefinitely. Some business contacts reported having reached their minimum staffing levels.
This is economic analysis, rather than a study of employee wellbeing. My practical takeaway is that leaders need to check whether capacity has actually improved before increasing expectations.
If a new tool saves time on one task, what happens next?
Perhaps it creates space for better work. Perhaps it removes repetitive administration. Perhaps the time is immediately filled with additional demands.
That is a management decision worth making deliberately.
When introducing AI, ask which tasks will stop, which will change, and how the team will assess the time spent checking and correcting its output.
Make wellbeing part of everyday management
I teach practical skills around stress, movement, sleep and attention. Individuals have a role in looking after themselves, and understanding these areas can give them useful tools.
Organisations also have responsibility for the conditions in which people work.
That means looking at meeting habits, realistic priorities, communication expectations and opportunities to recover. It means giving managers a way to respond when someone says they are at capacity.
For a leadership team, I would start with three conversations:
- Availability: What genuinely needs an immediate response, and what can wait?
- Workload: When a new priority arrives, what gets delayed, delegated or removed?
- Flexibility: What do people feel comfortable doing in practice, regardless of what the policy allows?
Choose one specific change, agree who will take responsibility and review it with the team. That might mean protecting focused work time, reducing unnecessary meetings or clarifying expectations outside working hours.
The aim is to create conditions where people can do good work and sustain it.
Start the conversation in your organisation
My workplace wellbeing and leadership workshops help teams explore the relationship between working practices, wellbeing and performance, then identify practical changes they can make.
If these questions sound familiar in your organisation, get in touch to discuss a workshop for your team.