EVIL HR LADY
DILEMMA OF THE MONTH
Can I Make My Remote Workers Come Back ?
BY Suzanne Lucas
ILLUSTRATION : JOHN CHASE
We ’ ve been working remotely since March 2020 , and lots of my staff have moved away . Even though we want to stay largely remote , we want employees to come into the office at least a few times per month . But some of our employees are living in other states . No one asked permission to move , as we just all did what we thought was necessary to get through the pandemic . Can I force them to move back ? Can I terminate people ? If we had known people would move out of the area , we would have put restrictions on where they could work much earlier .
My first question is : Is this working for you ? I know you want people to be in the office a few times a month , but do they need to be ? They might . I don ’ t know your business . But if you ’ ve been working for almost two years this way , do they really need to come back ?
That said , having employees in different states brings many headaches . Employees are subject to the employment laws and taxes for where they work , not for where the company is headquartered . You can be as flexible as possible and still reasonably say to your employees , “ You need to stay in California .” If they choose not to come back , you can give them fair notice and terminate them .
Most likely , they are at-will employees ( workers who can be terminated at any time without cause ), and legally you can just terminate them without notice or severance . But terminating your good em-
24 comstocksmag . com | January 2022