Employee is refusing to resume the work from office after Lock Down

Hi,

I am working in an IT company in Ahmedabad. We have 25 employees. We resumed work from the office on 15th June 2020 after the lockdown was lifted, as the government had notified that every business could start operating. However, some of our employees are refusing to return to work. We asked them to rejoin at their convenience before 1st July 2020, but one employee mentioned that her family is not allowing her to come back to Ahmedabad. Furthermore, her in-laws are insisting that she resign if we do not permit her to work from home until her husband's company resumes normal operations.

In this situation, what actions can be taken?

This employee has refused to report back for duty at Ahmedabad (post lockdown as announced by the State Government) and is willing to resign from her job. However, she seems to be willing to continue working from home.

Please explore if your company could allow her to work from home and contribute effectively to ensure the job is accomplished, especially if she is a critical resource.

If the company's policy does not permit such options, you can find an alternate resource. If the project is so critical that the particular employee is essential to coordinate and complete the job within a given timeframe, you can consider her request for continuation of the job from home as a special case until the project is completed. Meanwhile, a suitable replacement resource should be found and trained to fit the bill to prevent any potential damage. Eventualities like this cannot be ruled out in any organization; companies should be prepared to be dynamic and flexible as the focus should always be on results.

Panchsen

P. Senthilkumar

I would urge you to explore the possibility of allowing this employee to work from home. The only issue is that if you allow her to work from home, then you're being unfair to other employees who are coming into the office.

Since we are all at very early stages of reopening, I would ideally make it voluntary for employees to choose whether they want to work from the office or from home. Also, there are a few key things that you - as an employer - should do to make your employees feel safe working from the office, such as:

- Open your office gradually in multiple phases
- Enforce social distancing by having your office operate at smaller capacity, say, 25% in the first phase
- Clean and disinfect your offices every single day
- Provide a simple PPE kit with disposable masks, hand gloves, and cleaning supplies to your employees
- Work with your employees to disinfect high-touch surfaces multiple times during the day (using the PPE kit you provided)

I've created a short video laying out the best practices for reopening offices safely. Feel free to check it out: https://youtu.be/aHDPSd1puB0

Apologies, I realize that I posted the wrong link in my previous post. Here's the correct one: https://youtu.be/BowUQtd4l6Y

Regards!