A member of staff has requested compressed hours, keeping their contracted hours unchanged at 37.5 but working them over 4 days / 9.5 hours a day.

We are supportive of flexi-working and have a range if flexi-time agreements in place. We really try to accommodate flexi-time requests.

I've got concerns about this request for a couple of reasons:-

1) The individual is responsible for internal finance and although there is another member of staff within the team, they have limited knowledge of the day to day running of her processes. If she is regularly unavailable I've got a genuine concern we will be unable to deal with urgent issues and obtain information promptly.

2) We have many staff that work voluntary overtime, If we agree compressed hours for this employee some may feel they are being unrewarded  or treated unfairly and it may open the floodgates to an unmanageable number of similar requests. Although we'd follow our standard case by case business impact review process, the increased number of requests may lead us to reject them because the business can't manage resource when staff are out of the office and then we'd be treating one employee more favourably than another.

Any advice or comments would be appreciated.