Formal Recognition Without Structural Change: When Flexible Working Rights Matter for Employee Well-being | WIP Seminar with Daisy Pollenne

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Abstract | Rights to request changes to working conditions have become a prominent tool for promoting employee well-being. Rather than restructuring work or guaranteeing specific outcomes, these rights extend formal entitlements to request adjustments—to leave entitlements, to working hours or location—while leaving core features of work organization largely unchanged. This paper examines whether and how such structurally decoupled policies matter for employees well-being, reframing decoupling not as a question of organizational legitimacy, but of employee experience. To do so, I draw on the United Kingdom's 2014 extension of the right to request flexible working, a reform that substantially expanded eligibility without altering the procedural architecture governing requests. Difference-in-differences designs in panel data spanning 2009 to 2024 indicate that the reform increased perceived availability of flexible arrangements without increasing their actual use, and without producing aggregate well-being gains. Individual fixed-effects models highlight that perceived availability is nonetheless positively associated with well-being, suggesting the policy-induced perceptual shift is not meaningless, but insufficient on its own. Using matched employer-employee data from 2011—a pre-reform baseline free of policy-induced variation in perceptions—I find that perceived availability translates into well-being where employees have greater task autonomy and where managers face few structural constraints. These findings suggest that procedural policies reshape how employees understand what their organization offers, but whether this improves well-being depends on the structural features of work organization in which such policies are embedded.

Daisy Pollenne joined INSEAD in September 2024 as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Stone Centre for the Study of Wealth Inequality. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a Master's degree in Social and Political Sciences from Sciences Po, Paris. Prior to joining INSEAD, Daisy served as a researcher at DARES, the evaluation department of the French Ministry of Labour. She also collaborated with various non-governmental organisations, focusing on refugees' social and workplace integration. At INSEAD, Daisy is working with Professors Maria Guadalupe, Kaisa Snellman and Mark Stabile on research related to work and well-being. Her broader research interests encompass workplace norms, such as those that promote gender equality or the inclusion of marginalised groups, and the relation between workplace well-being, productivity and performance.