Employee won’t return to work due to house move
Location, location, location
With vast numbers of workers suddenly being forced to work from home during 2020, some of them are re-evaluating their living arrangements and deciding they want to move to a bigger home in a cheaper housing area, with a study and a garden being high on their essentials list. However, as offices gradually return to normal in 2021, you could be faced with a situation where you require an employee to work in their physical workplace, say for two or three days a week or even full time. But they claim that it’s too far for them to commute as they now live 100 miles away.
Pro advice. If you’re worried about staff moving home without realising the full implications, it’s worth emailing everyone now with a reminder that they will, in due course, be required to return to their physical workplace and so will still need to be able to commute (see Follow up ).
Pro advice. If you agreed with an employee that they could permanently change their normal place of work to their home, whether as part of a flexible working application or otherwise, then that’s now a term of their employment contract and you can’t just go back on it.
Contractual place of work
Assuming that any homeworking arrangement was only ever a temporary measure during the pandemic, subject to complying with the Covid-19 Secure guidance and addressing health and safety concerns (particularly in relation to vulnerable workers), you can require an employee to return to their contractual “ normal place of work” at any time.
Pro advice. If the employee then submits a formal flexible working request for a permanent, full-time homeworking arrangement, deal with it in the normal way ( yr.3, iss.22, pg.5 , see Follow up ). This might mean that you strike a balance, under which they can continue to work from home a couple of days a week but must return to the office on the other days to meet business needs.
Disciplinary action
If the employee refuses to return to their contractual place of work simply because they now live too far away to commute, they are committing a breach of contract and you can take disciplinary action under the terms of your disciplinary procedure for that breach and for their failure to comply with a lawful and reasonable management instruction. It’s really up to them how they get to work now. The fact that they are geographically farther away due to their house move isn’t really your problem.
Pro advice. If the employee fails to attend their workplace, but is still working from home, then it’s not unauthorised absence.
Pro advice. As it’s not unauthorised absence, it’s probably advisable to follow the written warnings process rather than treating this as gross misconduct. If the employee then continues to fail to attend their workplace when required, they’ll be facing dismissal within a matter of weeks. At least this way you’ll have given them a reasonable chance to sort out their new commuting arrangements.
Pro advice. You can’t discipline someone just because they’ve moved farther away from the office without your agreement, unless it was a contractual requirement that they live nearby because of their particular job duties (see Follow up ).
Reminder of eventual return to normal place of work
Previous article on post-lockdown flexible working requests
Requirement to live near work clause
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