Is Working From Home Becoming a Thing of the Past?

However, as BBC News reported recently, some employers are now requiring staff to work in the office for at least some of the week, with Amazon apparently requiring five days a week in the office.

Can an employee be forced to return to the office if they don’t want to? The first step in answering that question is to look at the contract of employment.

Many employees who have started a new job during or since the pandemic will have a contract that allows them to work from home all or some of the time. If that is the case, then if the employer wants to bring them into the office full time, this will constitute a change to the terms and conditions of employment. A change such as this cannot be made without first consulting the employee and will generally require some form of consideration (usually a pay increase) in order to be legally binding.

The risk is that someone who has accepted a job offer on the basis that it allows working from home may well instead choose to resign rather than work in the office full time.

What if there is no provision for working from home in the contract? This is likely to be the case for employees who were in post before the pandemic. The employer can argue that they are simply enforcing the existing terms of the contract of employment. An employee may in turn argue that, if they have been working from home since 2020, the contract has been varied by virtue of custom and practice over a number of years. It is likely that 2025 will see claims being issued in the Employment Tribunal to decide which is correct.