The laws about flexible working changed last Sunday. And according to an informal poll that ran for three weeks on Microsoft's bCentral.co.uk site for business owners during March, only 20% had heard about it.

The laws in question comprise the Employment Act 2002, and the changes centre around families. The main features of the act include:

· Parents with children under six or disabled children under 18 have the right to apply to work flexibly and employers will be obliged to take this seriously; and

· Maternity leave rights have increased, with statutory maternity pay increasing to £100 per week, plus there are extra rights to paternity leave and adoption leave.

The first point can be facilitated by IT to a large extent, mostly through the take-up of broadband and the installation of an extra phone line and PC in the employee's home. One company that has already implemented flexible working is Business Link North and Western Lancashire, which has around 64 business advisers working from home.

"The initial cost can be considerable," concedes IT director Martin Gore, citing the costs of computers and ISDN connections at the time: broadband has subsequently become available, bringing the cost down slightly. "We already had a lot of the communications infrastructure in the office, which made for a saving."

Using an internet connection, the advisers have been able to get into the back office system through its Citrix implementation. This is a secure technology that lets remote employees into the network and keeps intruders out. "Using our virtual private network, they can use our customer relationship system as if they were here, cutting out a lot of unnecessary travelling time."

The changes for employers will be as much managerial as practical. Ensuring people actually work when not on site is inevitably an issue, although not the major one a number of people think. "We have a culture of empowerment here, which means people basically do their job," says Gore. The major attitude change employers will need to make is that they will be paying for results rather than bums-on-seats time. The culture of presenteeism is likely to start looking dated very quickly.

However, employers are only obliged to consider requests for flexible working rather than agree to them immediately.

Belinda Lester, a solicitor in the employment law group at Sprecher Grier Halberstam LLP, points to a number of reasons to turn people down: extra burden or additional costs, detrimental effect on the ability to meet customer demands, the inability to reorganise work among remaining staff, impacts on quality and performance and any other regulations that may be introduced.

Even assuming an application to work flexibly succeeds, there are practical issues. When someone buys or agrees to rent a home, they sign a clause undertaking not to run a business from it. Using equipment for business also has an impact on whether or not it is covered in domestic insurance policies, and any public liability insurances will have to be extended to cover the employee and business visitors at their home.

These are not the only issues that will need attention: some will need the power of precedents to sort them out. The onus of making the business case for home working is clearly on the employee, for example, but it is not clear who will have to pay for any extra equipment required.

Many employees will have a PC, and, increasingly, will have a broadband connection, but whether these will be secure enough for most employers is another issue. And if there is extra expenditure expected from the employer, then it is unfortunate that the tax breaks through which a company could get 100% relief on ICT purchases expired on March 31.

Overall, such family-friendly legislation must be welcomed in principle. There are enough devils in the detail, however, to make for an bumpy start.