Flexibility is retention, and it is unevenly granted

Informal arrangements favour whoever is comfortable asking.

Arrangements around hours, location and leave are among the strongest retention factors reported by people with caring responsibilities, health conditions or long commutes, which is a large share of any workforce.

Where flexibility is granted informally, manager by manager, it is distributed according to who feels able to ask and who has a manager inclined to say yes. That produces inequity that is invisible in policy and entirely visible to the people affected.

The fix is a stated position on what is available by default, so that the request is about a variation rather than about an exception. It also removes the situation in which somebody leaves because they assumed the answer would be no.

Requirements around flexible work requests, and the grounds on which they may be refused, exist in some jurisdictions and differ substantially. Where a request is being declined, the applicable obligations should be checked rather than assumed.

The other decomposition worth running is by recruitment source. Where people hired through one channel consistently leave early, that usually indicates a mismatch in how the role is being described rather than a difference in the people, and it is correctable at the point of advertising.