Employee on leave working from home
Kent
42 Posts
We have an employee that will soon go out on leave for major surgery. Recuperation time will be 6-8 weeks. She will be covered under our Short Term Disability plan and FMLA. She has indicated that a couple of weeks after surgery, she would like to start working from home on her laptop. I've seen threads about requiring someone to work from home while out on FMLA approved leave is not recommended. But what about when the employee requests the option to do this. The nature of her job would allow her to do quite a bit of her work from home. Would we still need a doctor's release to show she is able to return to work, even at home?
Comments
Would you then pay her hours worked for the time spent working at home or continue to pay her under your STD plan?
We also just had an employee have surgery and while she cannot drive, she is able to work...so she's been doing some work from home...she's using intermit. FMLA for this...
a lot of it is trust in the employee too...
we don't have a specific policy covering this...but we should.
My $0.02 worth.
DJ The Balloonman
I would not do it UNLESS the employee is extremely critical to the operation and their work is largely going undone in their absence and the end result of doing this will by far outweigh the administrative nightmare.
Another thing to consider: If the employee is working half time at home, that will in effect double their available FML entitlement and you may find yourself in this mess twice as long as you anticipated.
We don't have a formal telecommuting policy, but we do have a guideline that spells out what kind of positions and employees make good candidates for telecommuting. We also have an agreement that documents with the employee that the arrangement can be discontinued at any time. We consider it on a case by case basis, so I don't think you would necessarily be obligated to let anyone who wanted to work from home do it. But if you later have a similarly situated employee request it, you'd need a very good reason to deny it.