Employee Living on-site

JEverett · October 2001

We are a small technology start-up company with a less than rigid culture. I have an employee who lives in another city and commutes to Austin during the week to work. He has decided that living on-site was OK. Without checking with anyone, he has moved into his cube and is literally living there during the week. Beside the fact that it's strange, can anyone come up with reasons why I shouldn't allow this to continue?
Thanks.

Down_the_Middle · October 2001

About a million reasons!!!!!! Not the least of which is that the workplace is being treated as a residence and with that comes some liability exposure to risk/injury, can the employee use his "sleeping quarters" for personal activity, how do you secure the bldg with an in-house resident????????

Forgive me, but the answer to your question is analagous to what's wrong with inviting your former girl/boy friend to come live with you and your current spouse/partner/significant other......

JEverett · October 2001

Thanks for your response. Being a start-up high tech company, it is not unusual for several of our Engineers to work late into the night, if not all night.
I understand the legal ramifications, but it isn't too far out of our "culture" for people to sleep here at times. I realize there is a difference between living here and sleeping here on ocaision.
I just hate to go straight to the legal reasons without first trying to look at the human side.
Regards,
Jim

Hatchetman · October 2001

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 10-01-01 AT 07:01PM (CST)[/font][p]You may wind up paying overtime. The emplyee is living right there oat his work site. So, some time down the road, he sprovides time records, that he completed, showing that from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. every evening/moring, 7 days a week, he was working in addition to his regular work shift. The company would be liable because the company allowed him to stay overnight at work and didn't know what he was doing so couldn't say he wasn't actually working. That's what FLSA would say is permitting the employee to work overtime, even though it wasn't specifically authorized by the employer.

Get him out of there NOW. Everything is at risk. Who kinows what he is doing rummaging through the offices. Geez!

bsa · October 2001

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 10-02-01 AT 08:33AM (CST)[/font][p]You can't get around it -- all the reasons for moving him out are legal ones. But, the man is not getting proper rest and relation [u]away[/u] from work, which we all know will eventually affect his job performance. I know Austin, it's a college town, there are cheap places to live -- he may just need someone to help him find that part of town. Also, it's unsanitary -- your building is not zoned for residents and he will eventually begin to show signs of neglected personal hygiene!

jgreen · October 2001

College town? Cheap places to live? In Austin? Ha ha! You obviously are talking about Austin in 1971, not Austin in 2001! (Man, I wish it were cheap again.)

Mikki H · October 2001

We are fighting a similar issue with our owners (physicians) right now, only its not even an employee staying on-site. Our medical practice "invites" physicians from China to visit for anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months to observe our surgery practices. However, when we have a group here, they are put up at various physician's homes and they are getting a little tired of housing, feeding, transporting etc. these visiting physicians. Our physicians want to turn an unused office into a living suite, install a shower in the men's room (we already have kitchen facilities. Our Compliance/Security Officer is going crazy with the ramifications of this action, but the physicians still want to do forward with it. In a medical practice, we have all sort of privacy/security issues (and new ones going into effect by next year). We are having trouble dealing with the "I'm the owner and I'm going to do what I want to do" attitudes even in the face of the trusted Compliance Officer stating what a disaster it would be. We will see what happens in the next few weeks.

Margaret Morford · October 2001

You might check and see if that violates zoning regulations in your area. I'll bet it does. Why not rent a corporate apartment?

Margaret Morford
theHRedge

Mikki H · October 2001

That is what I suggested, but there is a transportation issue too. Most of our visiting physicians do not or can not drive. If they stay at the office, they can walk to the hospital. If they stay at a physicians house, they drive in with them. We would need to provide some type of "chaffeuer" service if the visiting physicians stayed anywhere else. I am really depending on our new Compliance/Security Officer to stop this action.

rexxie · October 2001

What about housing bldg? Does your hospital have housing for residents/ nurses (either dormitory or apartments) etc? If so, there might be something you could work out with them. When I worked at a hospital, we had a residence bldg for certain employees (studios/1 & 2 BR apartments). We converted the first 4 floors into office but kept apartments to 'rent' to patient's families, out-of-town visitors (MD's) on a nightly basis.

If you go to a 'suites' hotel, they frequently have shuttle service for a nominal fee that these foreign physicians' could afford. OR if the medical practice is paying for them to come over (?), then they can hire a part-timer to shuttle them around or find housing that's close/appropriate/affordable and assign a driver to them.

Good luck.

Gar · October 2001

The long and the short of this problem's solution is that you should tell the employee to go home or anywhere else, but he simply has to leave the premises if he's not authorized to work.

CuriousG · October 2001

One way to "encourage" this employee to consider seeking other accomodations would be to figure up the fair market value of the "residence" he has created on your site, and deduct that from his pay. FLSA allows you do this when calculaatling minimum wage. In fact, the IRS probably would require you to either do this, or imput the value to him as income for tax purposes.

This would only be fair, since other employees are not getting the economic advantage he does by living on-site and avoiding house costs.

In the end, it is not really a legal issue, as it is an employee "hygene" issue. It is not good for this employee to so closely intertwine his/her personal and business lives. We already spend more waking hours at work than we do in our own homes. When someone literally makes work their home, it does not provide for the mental, spiritual,emotional and social outlets that a "home-life" brings to the worker.

Is it possible your employee might be lacking in social skills, and staying immersed in the workplace, where he or she feels comfortable, is a great escape?

Either that, or he is a mooch abusing the informality culture your company is promoting. Either way, ET needs to go home.

Employee Living on-site

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