We have already seen some imaginative ideas including Bloomberg offering its 20,000 world wide employees £55 per day to cover travel and Blackstone covering taxi costs for workers in London and New York. However, these types of incentive do beg the question……if an employee is genuinely concerned enough about their health and safety to tell you that they don’t want to come to the office will a free journey to work or a free lunch really make a difference? And even if it does work won’t you simply be brushing the real reason that employees don’t want to return under the carpet?

With one of the most Googled questions of late being ‘can my employer make me come back to work’ make sure you are ahead of the curve and ask yourself why it is that you need employees back in the office and how you can make the transition as easy as possible (for the employees sake as well as your businesses) For some this will be straight forward and the answer is simply that the work cannot be done from home, but for those employers who don’t have a clear cut answer now is the time to sit down and consider your approach.

You’ll know from your own experiences that there is already a strong argument in place for those individuals wanting to remain at home as they have proven over the past 18 months that it can work (we suspect you’ve already similar conversations with your own employees) It’s a lot to think about and with a large proportion of employees still feeling nervous about returning to the workplace it’s important to strike a balance between your business needs, supporting employees and protecting yourself from any potential employment claims.

So, if you are yet to return to the workplace and are considering incentivising employees a word of caution from us….…when it comes to treating employees differently there is a risk of a potential discrimination claim being made against your business. Specifically, any less favourable treatment which may be associated with protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 (such as Sex, Race or Disability) may lead you into hot water. As an example, if an employee is reluctant to return to work because of an ongoing medical issue it may be categorised as a disability and treating them any less favourably (such as not giving a bonus to them as they are not in the office) would be considered discriminatory.    

Finally, remember that informal flexible working arrangements are different to formal requests made under the Flexible Working legislation so you must be careful to treat the 2 differently and ensure this is clear in your policies and process documentation and importantly, if you have asked employees to return to work and they haven’t done so without reasonable explanation this is considered as AWOL and unauthorised absence and can in some cases be dealt with under your disciplinary process.  

For help and support with transitioning back to the workplace please get in touch with us today.