We agreed to reduce an employee’s role temprorarily whilst his wife was pregnant. He was struggling with dealing with his ill wife and the job that he was employed to do. The busienss agreed to a temporary reduction of responsibilities and agreed (informally nothing in writing) that this would last 2 months.
The baby was born a month ago and now the business require the individual to pick up his old role.
The individual is refusing to do this.
I think that there are a number of options avaliable:
1) agree with the individual that he will pick up old role on reduced hours
2) formally write to individual requesting that he picks up old role and implications for failure.
What i need to know is what are the implications and what action that we can take? I would have thought we would be in a breach of contract sitauation and failure to follow legitimate management instruction which are potentially disciplinary offences.
