More than 8,000 individuals and organisations made submissions to the public consultation on the right to request remote working run by the Department of Enterprise and Employment which closed on Tuesday afternoon.
While 7,774 submissions were made by individuals who completed the employee form, 536 came from employers and others categories.
The consultation is the first part of a three-stage review of the current code of practice that was required under the terms of the legislation and is to be completed by March.
The high level of interest in the consultation is believed to have been motivated in part by frustration on the part of individual employees with the code, which was introduced in March 2024.
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It sets out a procedure for employees to request their employers’ permission to work remotely and provides a framework for employers to consider such requests.
It did not grant the right to work remotely, with employers retaining the authority to decline such requests based on a range of criteria including their business needs. Various cases have been taken to the Workplace Relations Commission, which only has the power to consider whether the procedures, as set out, were followed. The commission has awarded compensation in just one case.
Tracy Keogh, co-founder of Grow Remote, an organisation formed in 2018 to promote the remote working, said she hopes the consultation and wider review will lead to greater supports for companies allowing employees to work remotely and improvements to the existing legislation.
“Nothing will beat making this easy for employers,” she said on Tuesday after representatives of the organisation met with the Oireachtas all-party group examining remote working.
“We want to bring the different parties together to change the legislation, but even the legislation perfected is only going to get us so far and would probably leave us well short of what a lot of people would like to see,” she said.
“As it is, though, we are not even touching the sides of what is possible here. There are companies who want to embed this but have concerns with basic issues like insurance, questions we know the answers to. We don’t have centralised, national supports for employers as things stand and maybe if we were closer to that, we could reasonably push them a little harder.”
Fine Gael TD Emer Currie, who chairs the all-party group, said the legislation providing the right to request remote working was important but there is scope to improve upon the position for both employers and employees.
“The process tends to break down into three: you’ve got the process, you have what the decision is based on and you have the mechanism to scrutinise that decision. I think the legislation could be strengthened across all three,” she said.
“I think it could be strengthened from the perspective of the employee but we also have to support employers to help them meet that demand because this boils down to the relationship between an employer and employee, and we need to support that relationship.”
The most recent labour force survey by the Central Statistics Office suggests almost a million people work at least some of the time from home, with 557,800 working from home more than half the time.
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions Head of Social Policy and Employment, Laura Bambrick, said the Government review will include opinion polling and in-depth interviews with stakeholders. However, she said she does not expect significant changes to the thrust of the legislation, which allows employers to make decisions without having to root them in evidence.
