For anyone with a dog the prospect of leaving them alone for any amount of time is a painful, occasional necessity, with separation anxiety cutting both ways and official animal welfare guidance warning owners to limit these spells alone to four hours – a timespan at odds with most flexible working arrangements which usually require staff to spend two or three days a week on site. During Covid, taking due care to spend sufficient time for responsible pet care was easily achievable for many workers due to the huge shift to work-from-home (WFH) arrangements, which felt like an irreversible trend as companies sought to cut costs on office overheads where possible and to reap the benefits of happier staff. That trend kicked into reverse though as pandemic restrictions eased and more bosses sought to ensure staff spent more time on site to encourage better collaboration and reduce WFH abuses. It doesn’t take a maths whizz to spot the tension between the four-hour limit for leaving dogs alone and the standard eight-hour working day plus commute, and there’s clear evidence that increased return-to-work orders resulted in pets being rehomed – for example, research conducted by Novuna (opens new tab) finance in 2023 found that 22% of those surveyed who had rehomed their pet pooch in 2022-23 did so due to decreased opportunities to work at home. The issue is clearly a trickier one to navigate for single and newly single households. And unlike parents, dog owners can’t delegate the care of their beloved pets to nurseries, schools and colleges, and while daycare does exist, it comes with a cost in addition to concerns over causing dogs distress due to a sudden change in environment without the benefit of being able to communicate and rationalise its necessity as with fellow humans. Relatives, friends and kind neighbours are potential sources of respite and support for the dog owner in need, but again doesn’t offer a stable, secure solution. While worker rights have made significant progress with regards to the right to request flexible working from day one, the routinely advertised demands for what appear to be full days on site can be off-putting with the presumption being that if requests deviate from terms as advertised then it’s reasonable to assume they will be turned down.