Flexible working at the heart of HR priorities

A 2023 Randstad Belgium survey found that schedule flexibility is now the second most important factor in employment decisions for Belgian workers, behind only salary. For HR managers and business owners, this is not a trend to monitor at a distance and respond to eventually — it is an operational reality that demands a concrete, well-designed response now. Flexible working has moved from a differentiating perk offered by forward-thinking employers to a baseline expectation in the Belgian labor market. Organizations that do not offer it face a measurable and growing disadvantage in both recruitment and retention.

Flexible working at the heart of HR priorities

Today, working hours and physical office presence are no longer the rigid organizational defaults they once were. Flexibility is becoming essential for companies of all sizes and across all sectors — not just in knowledge work and professional services, but increasingly in retail, hospitality, healthcare, and logistics. The challenge for HR is not whether to offer flexibility, but how to implement it in ways that genuinely serve both the business’s operational requirements and its employees’ real needs.

What flexible working means in practice

Flexible working encompasses several distinct arrangements, each with different operational implications and implementation requirements. Understanding the full spectrum is important because the right type of flexibility varies significantly by role, sector, and individual employee circumstance:

• Flexible start and end times: Employees choose their own start and finish times within a defined daily band, provided core operational hours are covered — typically suitable for office-based and administrative roles
• Compressed working weeks: Full-time contracted hours worked in fewer than five days — for example, four 9-hour days — giving employees regular three-day weekends in exchange for longer working days
• Part-time working: Reduced contracted hours arranged to match both the employee’s needs and the employer’s operational coverage requirements across the week
• Remote and hybrid work: Some or all working days performed from a location other than the main workplace, governed in Belgium by specific collective labor agreements
• Annualized hours: A fixed total of hours contracted per year, distributed flexibly across the calendar according to business demand peaks and troughs — common in seasonal industries

Starting with what employees actually need

If you want to introduce meaningful flexibility into your workforce management, the essential first step is understanding what your employees actually need — not what you assume they need based on demographic generalizations or industry trends. Begin by holding individual or group conversations with your team to develop a clear picture of their specific flexibility expectations and constraints. Some employees may have childcare commitments that make flexible start times essential. Others may want to reduce commuting costs and time by working from home two days a week. Others may prefer four longer days to have consistent three-day weekends for personal commitments.

A structured anonymous survey of five to eight targeted questions can reveal the actual flexibility priorities of your team faster and more accurately than assumptions. The data from this exercise becomes the foundation for a flexible working policy that addresses real employee needs rather than theoretical preferences derived from generic workforce research.

Defining what is operationally possible before committing to anything

Not all flexibility is compatible with all operational requirements. Customer-facing positions, production roles, laboratory work, and shift-based hospitality and retail functions have minimum coverage requirements and on-site presence obligations that genuinely constrain individual flexibility. Defining these non-negotiable operational requirements for each role type before designing the flexibility offer prevents the disappointment and resentment that results from offering flexibility that turns out not to be deliverable for specific roles in practice.

The most effective approach is to map each role type to the flexibility options that are genuinely available given its operational constraints, and then design the maximum possible flexibility within those constraints. This produces a differentiated but honest flexibility offer — more transparency and more genuine benefit than a uniform policy that applies the same flexibility to all roles regardless of operational feasibility.

Managing flexible schedules without losing operational control

Flexible working multiplies scheduling complexity significantly. When employees have different start times, different working days, different location patterns, and different contracted hours, managing attendance, coverage, and compliance through spreadsheets or paper-based systems becomes rapidly unmanageable. Organizations attempting to offer genuine flexibility without digital scheduling infrastructure find themselves choosing between operational chaos and constraining the flexibility they have promised.

A digital scheduling platform that allows employees to register their availability preferences, managers to plan coverage across the full flexibility landscape, and both parties to communicate schedule changes in real time is the operational infrastructure that makes genuine and sustainable flexibility possible. Platforms that also automate Belgian labor law compliance checks — ensuring that flexible arrangements do not inadvertently breach working hour limits or collective agreement requirements — remove the compliance risk that otherwise accompanies flexibility expansion.

Practical tips for implementing flexible working

• Survey employees before designing any flexibility policy — begin with actual needs rather than assumptions
• Map minimum coverage requirements for each team and role type before communicating flexibility options to staff
• Write a clear, complete flexible working policy and apply it consistently and transparently across the organization
• Train all managers to evaluate performance by output and contribution rather than hours observed or physical presence
• Implement a digital scheduling tool to manage the coordination complexity that genuine flexibility creates
• Review the policy formally every 12 months and adjust based on employee feedback, operational experience, and changes in Belgian labor law

Frequently asked questions

Is there a legal right to request flexible working in Belgium?

Belgian law provides several mechanisms for requesting changes to working time arrangements. The Law on Workable and Agile Work (2017) introduced credit time and career break rights that give employees access to flexible working under specific conditions. Employees can also request part-time working or adjusted schedules under provisions in their applicable collective labor agreement. The specific rights available depend on the sector-level joint committee and the employee’s individual employment contract. HR managers should consult their social secretariat when evaluating specific employee requests to ensure the correct legal framework is applied.

How do you prevent flexible working from reducing team productivity?

The evidence from organizations that have implemented well-managed flexible working programs consistently shows that flexibility increases rather than reduces productivity when combined with clear output expectations and regular performance check-ins. The key operational shift required is from managing time and presence to managing deliverables and results. Managers who define clear weekly objectives, review progress in regular one-to-ones, and hold team members accountable for outcomes rather than observable activity find that flexibility motivates higher-quality work rather than enabling lower effort.

How do you ensure fairness when offering different flexibility to different roles?

Transparency and consistency are the foundations of perceived fairness in flexibility allocation. Publish the eligibility criteria for each flexibility option and the operational reasons why certain roles qualify and others do not. Apply the criteria consistently across all team members in the same role type. Create a clear, documented process for requesting flexibility, reviewing requests, and communicating decisions with reasons. When flexibility cannot be offered due to genuine operational constraints, explain this honestly rather than leaving employees to assume the reason is favoritism or arbitrary management discretion.

Can frontline and shift workers benefit meaningfully from flexible working?

Yes, but the form of flexibility that is relevant and deliverable is different from what is available to office-based employees. For shift workers, meaningful flexibility means the ability to indicate availability preferences in advance, initiate shift swaps with colleagues subject to manager approval, have input into their scheduled days off, and access their schedule from a mobile app rather than waiting for a paper roster to be posted. Digital scheduling platforms that support these employee-initiated interactions give frontline workers genuine and valued flexibility within the coverage constraints of their operational environment.

Shyfter makes flexible working operationally manageable for Belgian businesses of all sizes and sectors. With digital availability management, mobile schedule access, employee-initiated shift swaps, and automated Belgian labor law compliance, Shyfter gives HR managers the tools to offer genuine flexibility without losing the operational control and coverage certainty the business requires. Discover Shyfter for flexible workforce management.