To think your employers cannot dictate where you live?

[MinaHarker1897]

A colleague has been back at work after maternity leave for about 11 months now. She has also gone part time to three days and moved back to her hometown which is about 2 hours away. She is in work one day and works at home the other two.

I overheard a conversation between two other colleagues about this with one saying staff are "not allowed" to live a certain distance away from home. I asked her "what do you mean, not allowed? They can't dictate where someone can live" - she said they can. I've never heard of any employer being able to make these rules over staff's personal life, has anyone else?

Depends on job/type of employment surely.
I work at a university and staff have to live within 1 hour commute. Only contract I've ever had it written into.

It depends on the job contract, some can stipulate that you must be within a certain time/distance away. Any decent person also shouldn't be so far away that getting to work presents a regular or ongoing issue.

Is that in case there's bad weather or something? So the uni/lessons is less likely to close or be cancelled due to lack of available staff?

We moved to South Yorkshire from West Yorkshire after DH was offered a job in Sheffield (I was already commuting to Sheffield). His employer stipulated that he needed to live within 12 miles of his workplace as he had a fully expensed company car. They paid for our removal expenses.

You heard one colleague saying it - doesn’t make it a thing. Your employer is not dictating anything about where you live. If they did you'd have know about it when you started the job.

If the other colleague has chosen to create a four-hour commute for herself, your employer's ony concern will be timekeeping. They can dictate when they expect her to arrive and leave on in-office days.

"Reasonable" is pretty subjective though.

If someone is happy to do it and doesn't complain or use their commute as an argument to wfh more than the company allows, then who's to say it's not reasonable.

Yeah I haven't questioned it as it doesn't apply to me so no idea how far would be too far. I assume they mean if you work in the north of England then you shouldn't move to Penzance because if you're needed in the office at short notice you're not going to be able to get there.

Probably because universities have been flexible for a long time and there have always been academics (who don't need a lab) who take the job and don't move. I've had more than one colleague living abroad who just flew in for teaching.

When a large portion of a department does that it's not really compatible with a cohesive team.

It really depends what it says in her contract around working from home, I think.

If it's discretionary and they can potentially call her back into the office, then they won't want her to have the excuse that she lives too far away to come in. In that case it's reasonable for them to say she needs to be within a commutable distance.

If her WFH days are actually in her contract then I can't see the issue.

Where I work all grades from Programme Manager and above have to be "on call" for 4-5 weekends a year and have to be within an hour's travel at those times. So whilst you don't have to live within the area, if you don't you would need to make arrangements for your on call weekends.

Oh and I've also had jobs where living on site was a requirement. But you know that when you apply.

Same here, north west university. There was some concern over someone who lived well across the border in North Wales - don’t know how it ended though. But there was definitely a residency requirement. But that was 30 years ago.

It depends on the job & the contract, it can be a requirement yes.

I think that’s fair enough. Moving to Devon because you’ve been working from home over Covid, would probably be foolish because the company could say that they wanted everyone in the office every day

Whinging then that you didn’t want to commute two hours there and back every day would be unreasonable.

I think the new Starbucks CEO was commuting from Southern California to Seattle on a private jet.

I would have thought it depends on the circumstances, the role and the business needs.

However while contracts are important we learnt from speaking to an employment solicitor that not everything in the contract is enforceable many employers rely on employee not checking with UK law so many employers put clauses that under UK law they can't enforce.

Not being an employment solicitor I've no idea if where you live could be one of them.

Though an hour away already seem problematic to me as we don't drive - so it it an hour by car - assuming you'd get taxi in emergency - or is it normal public transport and if you can do it in an hour what happens when trains or buses stop overnight.

I know someone who works in London, has London weighting, but lives in Coventry.

I've never come across that in local government or the civil service. In both of those, I had colleagues commute to London from places like Brighton and Letchworth.

Certain roles can dictate you need to be at work in x minutes (fire service?). Otherwise no, as long as she's on time all OK.

I interviewed somebody who lived just around the corner from the business. They were absent from their current employment long term, 3.5 hours minimum drive away, due to sickness (the stress of driving the distance). All I can say is we did not offer them the job.

DH has always had a distance from his surgery as a stipulation in his contracts. (Usually 5 miles)

Depends what you mean by “dictate”?

They can’t magically force anyone to move house. Unless accommodation is part of the role.

They can work towards sacking someone cause they can’t attend the office anymore, sure. But it’s more likely they’ll consider a transfer first.

They can.

I've had jobs in the past that required me to live within a certain locality.

But it has to be in your contract.

Fine if they commute. But I know somebody in the civil service who started their work in London, then moved to East Anglia and continued to receive their London pay while working from home. I think they have now said that X days need to be worked in the office, this person will travel down to London occasionally, maybe once a fortnight but doesn’t meet the minimum office days that they should. It’s taking the piss in my opinion.

Loads of people do that in the civil service. My friend is a software developer and her office is in London so she’s on London weighting. She lives in the Midlands. It’s always been that way and is all above board - the department doesn’t have any local offices. Plus the civil service generally doesn’t like to reduce salaries.

Maybe in big departments like the operational ones, are they more comfortable transferring staff between London weighting and national

if she works part time she’s basically working 33% of her time in the office. That’s the equivalent of almost 2 days in the office for a full time employee and that assumes she doesn’t work during her commute or work longer hours during her office day. 2 days in the office is sufficient for most roles now.

Honestly I’d have taken down the names of the two employees and raised a formal complaint with HR that they were engaged in gossiping and bullying by talking about another employee’s work practices. Because that is exactly what it was. No employer will restrict where you live - some used to have travel time limits but with technology improving and houses in city centres growing more expensive these are legacy now even in Finance IT where they used to be heavily utilised.