As the number of employees taking sick days rises across the country, companies are being told to go it alone to decide their own work from home policies.
that given there are no current government mandates to work from home, if a worker’s employer wants them in the office they don’t have much power to insist otherwise.
“Increasingly, as society adapts [to the virus] it becomes less and less likely that an employee will be able to argue a direction to return to work is unreasonable,” he said.“In almost every case, that request [to return to the office] will be a lawful request, provided the return to work doesn’t involve any illegality outside the scope of the employment contract,” Wakefield said.
Employees who resist employers’ directions to return to the office therefore potentially leave themselves open to disciplinary action. Her Melbourne colleagues, who have suffered more frequent and more protracted lockdowns, are generally more reluctant than Perth colleagues to come back into the office regularly, she said. Meanwhile, Sydney and Brisbane are somewhere in the middle.
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