Working from home can be a great way for working mums and dads to fit in a full-time job around their children. Being close to childcare arrangements, convenience, flexibility and the time and money saved by avoiding the daily commute, can all be great benefits for parents and non-parents who opt to work from home.
However, I get a lot of queries from people who feel overlooked because they no longer have a presence in the office, and I am often asked what to do if working from home is preventing a promotion.
In the UK there are laws in place to protect people from many kinds of prejudice. From age, ethnicity and marital status to nationality, equal opportunity legislation ensures that people are employed, treated, trained and promoted based on their skills and abilities, not because of discriminatory factors.
In the case of being denied a promotion due to working from home, this could potentially be a breach of equal opportunity policy and lead to a claim of sex discrimination.
This type of claim may arise because working from home is often a request made on the grounds of childcare and therefore tends to affect more women than men. Therefore, this could potentially be a sex discrimination claim.
In order to bring about a successful claim for sex discrimination, you would need to gather evidence to support this. For example, a record would need to be kept of who is promoted ahead of you and where they were based.
If you genuinely believe you are not being promoted solely because you work from home, the first port of call would be to raise a formal grievance with your employer.
Only if things are not resolved through this process would you then consider resignation and claims for sex discrimination and unfair dismissal.
By Sarah Calderwood, employment law specialist at Slater Heelis (www.slaterheelis.co.uk/employment).