Five years has passed since employees were first given the right to request to work flexibly, and it feels like the drumbeat for more varied ways of working is getting ever louder. It certainly no longer seems odd to say that you work from home half the time anymore, or that you job share, or that your office encourages hot-desking, reflecting the fact that its employees might come and go at different hours.

But with these changes come new challenges. How do you make sure your team members feel connected when they might be working across a number of different sites and at different hours? How do we make people see that flexible working isn’t only something for parents? And how do we persuade whole businesses – even the whole of society – to affect the changes that thus far may have only been taking place on an individual level?

One of the challenges for flexible working – which is also in my view its charm – is there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, there are only individual examples or stories. Here’s mine: