I asked to work remotely, and my company is acting like I resigned

A reader writes:

My employee handbook has a policy where if you want to switch to full-time remote work, you have to give three months notice.

My partner is starting grad school and we are planning on moving, so I asked my work to switch me to full-time remote in over three months. The handbook says they may not be able to accommodate this, so I was prepared for the potential “no.”

However, after giving the “no,” they met with me and said that as I’m moving in three months and they would not accommodate a shift to remote, I would not be able to work at my company anymore. I continued to express my gratitude and interest in continuing remote if possible, but that I understood. They asked me about my moving date/details, which I did not have on hand just yet. I asked when they would need these details by, they said by the end of the week. (This was Tuesday.)

The next day, I received an email asking me to confirm my resignation (which I never gave) and gave me an end date for my work a full month before my requested switch to remote/move. They also wanted to prorate my vacation days and sick time, including a vacation I had already scheduled and gotten approved months before this conversation.

This obviously gave me pause, as they seemed to think they could just … take away a month of my employment because I requested remote work.

I asked (again) for a few days to consider this, and they pushed me to write in writing that I resigned that day. Instead, I wrote that I will have to resign at the end of the three months if they were unable to accommodate me. Then, I contacted the lawyer in my family, who was helpful in giving me language to reiterate that I never formally resigned and that the conversation had always been about the full three months, not before. Therefore, the two-month end date they gave me would indicate that they were terminating my employment.

I sent that and then I contacted a local employment lawyer and am waiting to hear back, which is where I’m at right now.

But basically, it feels like I’m being punished for following the rules and would have been significantly better off waiting out the three months and giving my two weeks notice. Either way, I’m officially on the job hunt and really appreciate any thoughts you have. Should I have done anything differently?

Well, your employer operated in bad faith.

If you were clear that you were moving, it would have been fine for them to say, “Since you’re moving and we’re not able to offer you remote work, our understanding is that you’ll be resigning in three months. Is that correct?”

And if you’d been wishy-washy about that and not committed to a plan, it would have been fine for them to say, “We need to be able to plan and start transitioning your projects and hiring a replacement, so we’re going to move forward on the understanding that your last day will be sometime in April.”

If you had responded to that by saying you weren’t set on moving after all … well, then it gets trickier for everyone. Ideally they’d take you at your word about that and just move forward as if nothing had happened. But in reality, then they’d have to worry that you were saying to buy some time while still planning to move or while planning to push again for remote work once the time drew nearer.

So that’s the answer to your question about whether you should have done anything differently: if we had a time machine, I’d say not to present the moving plans as a fait accompli, but rather as something you were just thinking about but weren’t committed to.

However, when your employer’s handbook explicitly indicates they’re open to people switching to remote work and invites employees to give three months notice of their interest, they’re setting everyone up for problems if they respond to the requests they solicited by pushing people out early. It means that coworkers who hear what happened to you won’t take them at their word about this anymore; they’ll instead wonder if asking about working remotely will be converted into a resignation against their will, and that can’t possibly be what your employer intended when they drafted this policy.

You might try pointing that out — saying that you took the policy in the handbook in good faith and you have not resigned. In a different situation you could add that you have no current plans to resign — but since you do, you can’t say that at the same time that you’re complaining about them not operating in good faith.

Employment in the U.S. is at-will (unless you’re in Montana) so what they did isn’t illegal, just very crappy. (Although who knows what your employment lawyer might uncover. They can help ferret out any details like that three other people were treated differently in this regard, and the only difference is your race/sex/religion or other factors that could cast this in a different light.)

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