Is this fair?

[harrypoooter]

I have a bad leg injury which means I won't be able to get physically to the office.

I got a fit note from my doc saying I could work from home (which is standard practice in my work anyway)

My boss didn't deliver my laptop to my home for 4'weeks meanwhile I went on half pay (around 2 weeks in).

I have contacted HR and asked them what the policy is and how I can get my missing two weeks salary back as it wasn't my fault that I wasn't working but they aren't interested. It's a lot of money to me and I don't want it to slide!

I feel like his delay in getting my laptop to me makes me look absent for longer and has caused me to slip into half pay. They say I wasn't doing any work so I won't get it back. But if I had my adjustments met then I would have been back 'working' much quicker.

What can I do? I work for a massive government org and each time I get through to HR it's a different person and no one is taking this forward.

Help.

Hi I would have gone to the office to get the laptop, in a taxi if I couldn't drive.
If you were signed to work at home but didn't then you may not get paid for that time.

I can't walk/drive get out and I work on a govt site so my partner couldn't get on to get it. I repeatedly asked if he could collect it from the gate though. But they never replied!

Do you have access to occupational health ? They may be able to advise on acceptable timescales for adjustments to be put in place.

My manager took over 7 weeks to refer me to occ health. I haven't had my appointment yet.

My laptop has since been brought to me and I am online working now. It's just the delay on giving me it on their end has caused me
A loss in wage.

I really don't know what to do...

Unless your leg injury is a disability then your company is under no obligation to make any adjustments. You haven't been working. If it meant that much surely you could have got someone to go to the office to collect your laptop?

They wouldn't let me do that. I asked repeatedly to be able to have my partner pick it up and they ignored my requests.

I then contacted HR as I was sick and losing money and my laptop was delivered to me within 3 hours of the call to HR.

but there is still the matter of the 4 weeks I was on half pay because they hadn't given it to me.

I would submit a grievance

It also depends whether employees are normally permitted to work from home in these circumstances. Although you now have the laptop there may have been data security issues to overcome. Tbh it sounds as if it wasn't the departments priority to resolve this for you until HR intervened. Technically you were not available to work if your usual place of work is the office.

I can do my job remotely, and that's what I'm doing now, it just took weeks and weeks to get it to me. Im in the Civil Service, not small by any means.

I have considered raising a grievance but I only wanted to do so after I had checked whether I was being treated unfairly. It's such a gray area but if I don't fight I lose about £1000. It's a lot of money I can't afford to lose.

I would ring ACAS (or equiv.) for advice.

This is the type of thing it's virtually impossible to sort out after the event.

When your doctor gave you a fit note saying that you would be fit to work if you could work from home, did you actually get written confirmation that your employer was happy to agree to that? Was there a date agreed that you would come off sick leave and be working from home?

When that date came and went and your laptop didn't appear, what did you do? At that point you should have asked your manager to confirm that you would be taken off sick leave despite the fact that you weren't working if they had promised to deliver your laptop by a certain date, failed to do so and refused to allow you to collect it.

They are not obliged to make the adjustment, but if they confirmed that they would and confirmed that they would deliver your laptop and failed to do so and you made every effort to get it yourself and were refused, you have a reasonable argument that they should pay you.

There seems to be an inconsistency about HR. In your first post you said no one was taking it forward and they weren't interested, then in your recent post you said your laptop was delivered within 3 hours of calling them.

@flowery -when I got my fit note I called my manager and said I was fit to work. He said he would look into getting me set up at home. I didn't get confirmation that he would do it within x amount of time. So I have him a few days then emailed or called again. He then said he would look into it. This went on for weeks. Those are the weeks I'm talking about. When I finally got to the end of my tether and contacted HR that's when my laptop was brought to me within 3 hours.

However I never got a solid agreement throughout the whole process that he would give me my laptop at home which is where I went wrong.

I did challenge the being on half pay hing immediately but he told me to contact HR to get the clear policy. When I contacted HR they sent me the policy but it's very gray. It says he should make 'reasonable' adjustments for me. Whatever 'reasonable' means is the problem.

I'm quite resigned to the fact that I won't get my pay now, which is quite disappointing.