Does “working from home” mean working from anywhere? 

A finance manager who relocated to France against her employer’s wishes has lost her claims for unfair and wrongful dismissal at a Bristol employment tribunal. Iryna Malyk brought the case, Malyk v Teleperformance Contact Ltd, believing her “fully remote” contract let her work from wherever she chose. The tribunal disagreed, finding that her contract tied her to the UK even though nothing in it said so in as many words.  

Whilst the employer won in this instance, the judgment serves as a useful reminder about how clearer drafting and the better use of employment policies can help avoid such situations from arising in the first place.  

What happened 

Iryna Malyk worked for Teleperformance Contact Ltd as Regional Finance Business Partner (Europe) from May 2022. Her contract described her principal place of work as her “home office”, gave her address as Bristol, and referred throughout to UK employment legislation and her right to work in the UK. It did not, however, say in so many words that she had to work from the UK. 

When the company’s Bristol office closed in September 2022, Malyk began working entirely from home. In June 2024 she told her manager that her husband had found work in France and asked whether she could keep doing her job from there, either under her existing contract or a new French one. Her manager told her this would not be possible and mentioned, without going into detail, that it would ‘raise legal and tax issues’. Malyk was unconvinced, and she emailed HR to say she intended to relocate anyway. The company wrote back setting out that it could not support her working from France, gave her a formal instruction to work from the UK, and asked her either to reconsider or to resign with notice. 

Malyk moved to France in July 2024 regardless and continued working as she had indicated she would. An investigation, suspension, and a disciplinary hearing all followed, throughout which she was open about what she was doing and where she was living. However, she was subsequently dismissed on 27^th August 2024 with two months’ notice, and her internal appeal was rejected. Her tribunal claims failed too. 

Why the dismissal was fair 

The tribunal’s job was to work out whether Malyk’s contract actually let her work from France, because if it did, dismissing her for doing so would not have been fair. Judge Oliver found that it did not.  

Reading the contract as a whole, her Bristol home address, her workplace being described as a “home office”, and the way the whole document was built around UK employment law all pointed to a requirement to work from the UK, even without a clause spelling it out in those exact terms. Testing the same conclusion a different way, the judge also found the contract would not otherwise make sense. In short, describing Malyk as a home worker did not give her a contractual right to choose a home anywhere in the world. 

Teleperformance’s contract happened to contain enough detail to support that reading, but employers should not assume a tribunal will always be willing to piece the answer together in the same way. If “home” is the contractual place of work, the contract should say plainly what that means, for example a specific notified UK address, and whether working from another country requires prior written approval. Leaving location to be inferred from an address field and a few references to UK law is a considerably harder position to defend than simply writing it down. 

Because Malyk’s contract required her to work from the UK, the instruction to return was a reasonable one, and dismissing her for refusing to comply was a decision open to a reasonable employer. It is also worth noting how the company categorised that dismissal. It had initially treated the matter as potential misconduct, on the basis that Malyk had ignored a reasonable management instruction, but after the disciplinary hearing concluded that her conduct did not amount to misconduct at all. Instead, it dismissed her for what employment law calls “some other substantial reason”.  

Its position was that it could not continue employing her under her UK arrangements while she lived permanently in France, and the tribunal accepted that this was a ‘substantial’ rather than trivial reason.  

Where the employer could have done better 

Though the outcome was fair from the employer’s perspective, the case did highlight that the firm’s internal processes were far from faultless, and the judgment identified several points where they could have handled things better. 

The company did have a hybrid working policy addressing exactly this scenario, requiring any change of home working location to another country to be agreed with the line manager and local HR in advance. The problem was that it sat on the intranet, there was no evidence it had been sent specifically to remote employees, and it was never referred to during the disciplinary process. The judge said this could have been communicated more clearly. It is not enough to simply have a policy covering overseas working if employees don’t actually know about it and managers cannot reach for it the moment a request like this arises. 

But the gap in communication went beyond the policy itself and extended to the explanation Malyk was given for the refusal. She was told working from France on UK projects would cause “legal and tax issues”, without specifics, and was later told her manager would send further detail on the French social security position. He never did. The tribunal did not find this made the dismissal unfair, but it did say specific information about the legal risks would have helped at an earlier stage. Employers do not need to give an employee a technical briefing on foreign tax law, but they should be able to explain clearly why a request has been refused and what risk is actually driving the decision. 

Why working from another country is different 

The obvious question the case raises is why Teleperformance could not simply let Malyk carry on doing the same job from France. Moving where someone works can change the employer’s position in ways that have nothing to do with whether the work itself gets done. 

The first is legal and tax exposure. Depending on the employee’s role, activities, and length of stay, employing someone permanently from another country can create local payroll and social security obligations, and in some cases raise questions about whether the employer has established a taxable presence there.  

The second is that the employer remains responsible for the employee and the working arrangement, wherever the employee is based. That covers whether the employee actually has the right to work in that country, since permission to work in the UK does not automatically transfer elsewhere, and it covers health and safety too, since an employer that does not formally know where someone is living and working is poorly placed to meet its duty of care to them.  

The third is that moving the work can change the risk around information and systems, particularly for regulated businesses, which is worth planning for rather than assuming away. 

On that last point, it is worth being precise. An employee of the same UK organisation accessing its systems from overseas will not ordinarily create a restricted international transfer under UK GDPR simply because they are abroad, but employers may still need to think about security, client confidentiality, and any sector-specific requirements. The position can be different where a separate overseas group company, contractor or service provider is involved. 

Some of the online commentary around cases like this suggests an employee could simply use a VPN to make it look as though they were still logging in from the UK. That advice misunderstands what the VPN would actually be fixing. It might disguise where a login appears to come from, but it does nothing to change the underlying tax, immigration, or regulatory position, and it is not necessarily even effective at hiding the location itself.  

Teleperformance’s own IT records in this case showed connections from both UK and French addresses on the same day, which is exactly the kind of detail that tends to surface once anyone looks. Malyk had made no attempt to conceal her move, and the tribunal treated that openness as being to her credit during the investigation. Trying to disguise the location would also risk creating a separate conduct or trust issue, rather than solving the original problem. 

Remote does not mean anywhere 

The Malyk case does not establish that employers can simply refuse every overseas working request, nor that every homeworking contract necessarily means home in the UK. What it shows is the danger of leaving something as fundamental as working location to implication. Remote working and working from anywhere are not the same thing, and employers who want to keep that distinction should make it clear in the contract, reinforce it in policy, and explain their reasoning properly the moment a request is refused. 

About the Author: Steph Marsh is the Head of the Employment Law team at Coodes Solicitors. She has extensive experience in supporting both employers and employees on contentious and non-contentious matters, particularly surrounding discrimination issues, redundancy situations and data protection law. 

Get in touch: steph.marsh@coodes.co.uk  01579 324 017