work provided VPN failure - demanding holiday time used or travel to an office unpaid time as result

Midnight_Tboy

Hi,

I'm just curious to what peoples opinion of this situation is.

In my job, in a very large organisation, we are remote/agile workers, so working from home 3 days a week, at office 2 days a week.  There is insufficient space for all staff to be in 5 days a week due to them getting rid of some buildings during the old covid.

We work on work provided laptops, which connect to a work provided VPN in order to do our work that requires being connected to the VPN (not all work does need VPN connection - depending on the tasks for the day)

There was an outage of the VPN one morning, this was due to infrastructure changes that they had made to the VPN the night before which had to be rolled back

On that day, a particular senior manager, by about 10:30am said that everyone must come to the office to complete their work.  And if they can't come into the office then they must take a days annual leave

Now in that particular case on that day, regardless of that issue, my work did not require the use of the VPN, and if it had even in the office I'd have been unable to work due to needing to connecting to external machines which rely on the vpn lol.  The office being a 50minute drive away.  Within about 10minutes of that going out, the VPN began working again

Since that event, there have been no issues, though on days he has mandated that people come into the office on a specific day "in case" there are issues when changes are planned overnight that may cause issues like happened before.....I have no problem with that in theory where there is an actual need

I see this is getting long now so will get to the point.  Since then, there has been a team meeting, in that meeting he said that any day there is a VPN issue and a user is unable to work, they MUST come into the office.  But also mentioned on top of that that that persons travel time to the office is NOT working hours, and either is made up by staying back/making up the time, or by taking partial annual leave.

So is that legal for him to require us to potentially be forced to lose annual leave, or in the case of if they then during the working day/hours insist we travel in, that we forfeit our own time?  If they themselves are unable to provide the adequate ability to do the job for short periods of time when their network goes down?

Hope that makes sense

El_Torro

If your contractual place of work is the office then I don't see much issue in what the manager has said. After all it's normal for commute time not to be included in an employee's working hours. 

There are plenty of people out there who are told to be in the office 5 days a week, regardless of how feasible it would be for them to work from home. Be grateful you're not one of them.

Midnight_Tboy

El_Torro said:

If your contractual place of work is the office then I don't see much issue in what the manager has said. After all it's normal for commute time not to be included in an employee's working hours. 

There are plenty of people out there who are told to be in the office 5 days a week, regardless of how feasible it would be for them to work from home. Be grateful you're not one of them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I can work from home, this contention is more about the demand of annual leave be used up potentially (I have a child with special needs too so last minute changes could complicate things - even if this is not likely and a rarity the vpn goes down) though even before covid I was an "agile worker" that being said there literally aren't enough seats for people should everyone be in because they reduced the number of buildings they had significantly and added a desk booking system, before that having a desk of my own.  The main issue of contention to me is if THEIR vpn goes down (not my ISP) and they can't fix it, eg say it goes down at 10am on a 9-5 shift - for them to then say get into office....ok....but then to be told that us going into the office is time we have to make up, OR take it as part of our annual leave allowance...that is what seems wrong, when the fault is them failing their duty of service to provide a working connection

IIRC I believe my contract itself, pre covid, is as an agile worker as could at times be out and about, though of course with a designated main base.  Even then, to be told if a building is full, have to then travel to a different building, which in some cases are 20miles between

Hoenir

What does your contract of employment say in relation to your place of work. 

Dakta

I work in a company which almost exactly works the way you do - contractually I'm on 2 days a week 3 at home, with one slight difference - our office has never had capacity for everyone, not even pre-covid and it's got worse as they did let a couple of alternative work locations go during covid. As a result of this despite some light pressure to come back to the office, there is nothing in the pipeline to force us to resume the agreed contract (though ignoring any custom and practice, they absolutely could)

I've had my fair shair of problems - such as VPN going down, permissions being reset by a rogue script, having user acount/domain changes that needs an onsite logon first and things like that - I think it's reasonable to be prepared to come to the office, and on such days I have made the pilgrimage (it's a 1 hour drive, but typically 2-3 times that due to traffic as it's all on a motorway that shall we say - is eternally busy). That said, on those days I was never forced to make up time. In fact, despite having my own employer problems one thing they were really good at was giving you a nod to go home in the afternoon if it was quiet so you could avoid the commute on work time, and just do a little bit over when you got home. You weren't monitored and it wasn't checked if you made it up or not, it was more down to whether the work got done so if you didn't have a lot on you didn't have a lot on - it was just a case of dont take the Michael.

In terms of rules I don't know where you stand really - I'm actually on your side ethically - if you are expected to work from home, then that's what you should do and if their systems fail and there's a fault their side blocking you then totally that should be on them. I wouldn't go as far as paying travel costs but in terms of working day, because you're using your time to mitigate their system issues then it'd become work time.

The other thing I have issue with, is if the company is trying to exercise it's right to tell you when to take holidays as a mechanism to enforce this rule, there should be notice. 

I'd say this one is potentially one for the union if you have it, as I think you have a point, but it might cause a stink to raise.

Midnight_Tboy

Dakta said:

I work in a company which almost exactly works the way you do - contractually I'm on 2 days a week 3 at home, with one slight difference - our office has never had capacity for everyone, not even pre-covid and it's got worse as they did let a couple of alternative work locations go during covid. As a result of this despite some light pressure to come back to the office, there is nothing in the pipeline to force us to resume the agreed contract (though ignoring any custom and practice, they absolutely could)

I've had my fair shair of problems - such as VPN going down, permissions being reset by a rogue script, having user acount/domain changes that needs an onsite logon first and things like that - I think it's reasonable to be prepared to come to the office, and on such days I have made the pilgrimage (it's a 1 hour drive, but typically 2-3 times that due to traffic as it's all on a motorway that shall we say - is eternally busy). That said, on those days I was never forced to make up time. In fact, despite having my own employer problems one thing they were really good at was giving you a nod to go home in the afternoon if it was quiet so you could avoid the commute on work time, and just do a little bit over when you got home. You weren't monitored and it wasn't checked if you made it up or not, it was more down to whether the work got done so if you didn't have a lot on you didn't have a lot on - it was just a case of dont take the Michael.

In terms of rules I don't know where you stand really - I'm actually on your side ethically - if you are expected to work from home, then that's what you should do and if their systems fail and there's a fault their side blocking you then totally that should be on them. I wouldn't go as far as paying travel costs but in terms of working day, because you're using your time to mitigate their system issues then it'd become work time.

The other thing I have issue with, is if the company is trying to exercise it's right to tell you when to take holidays as a mechanism to enforce this rule, there should be notice. 

I'd say this one is potentially one for the union if you have it, as I think you have a point, but it might cause a stink to raise.

Thanks both.

I tried to connect to the intranet but it is not working at this time, to try look up, though the few documents I do have on my home PC say eg on the Contract of Employment Schedule  "Your duties are as set out in your job ,description, as amended from time to time" and in my old pre covid job description at the time of application says "Ability to undertake the duties of the post subject to reasonable adjustments under the DDA Requirement to travel between numerous xxxxx buildings. Able to meet xxx standards of attendance"

When I can access the intranet, ie at the office tomorrow etc, I'll try and take a look for any official guidance

Dakta you're right about not extracting the urine.  In fact, most days, especially working from home, I tend to do more than my time staying over, working during lunch, occasional unpaid weekend work etc, with the advantage of flexible time, and management always trusting us to do the work, and we deliver.  If anything hits the fan we'd always jump to get things operational again as part of a well functioning team.  The issue has arisen due to very recent restructures.  Before covid I actually changed my job within the organisation mostly to get away from this particular manager who is very unpleasant, and has caused many to leave.  Those that remained on those teams have been so demotivated that they've all turned to jobsworths as a result due to being ground down by him so much, so refuse to go above and beyond etc, simply as they are worn out by them, but when they work with others there is such a change in motivation.  Unfortunately with restructures and such, this person has risen the ranks yet again, and has now absorbed our current department/team of people under his wing, and even though his pay band he should be trusting the people below (my line managers) to manage people like myself to get the job done he is already micromanaging to the nth degree everything.  I have a massive amount of respect for nearly all the other staff and line managers and at times go above and beyond and they recognise that, they are unfortunately being attacked in all directions by this person too.  The majority of this team were actually about 80% defectors from the former job roles, those that weren't previously had heard the rumours but now witnessing it first hand.  But yes, it was his insistence in a large team meeting that this is is what you must do and must obeyed that rubbed me up the wrong way, plus past history of where I previously loved my old job (which I did for about 13yrs) to absolutely despising it and moving on, and after a couple of months under the new regime I can already see history repeating sadly

If these things happened under the original regime, and we got behind work, I'd actually just step up and take the good with the bad and do additional work to meet the goals....its when the person says you must do xxx and lose holiday time and force work over that I massively take objection to (but yes I acknowledge this is due to my disliking of the individual too that enhances the objection).

edit: and oh of course I wouldn't expect to be reimbursed travel costs for going to office.  I wouldn't be allowed to anyway as home to base is always deducted before any other miles

Brie

In the normal scheme of things travel to the office is in your time, not work time.  Else anyone with a 2 hour commute would only end up working 3 hours a day.  

But, if you are WFH and doing stuff and then the network goes down you are already in work.  Maybe the whole commute isn't work time if you might be doing it on your lunch hour.  

But if you are WFH and doing stuff and then the network goes down and you are told you have to come to the office immediately and leave Jr at home alone then that's not you taking a holiday.  That's you being forced into a situation not of your making and then should be allowed to continue at home, maybe flex the time.  

General_Grant

For a company to require you to take a specific day as holiday, they need to give at least two days notice.