When a remote employee is terminated how do you handle the collection of the hardware (laptop, docking station, printer, etc..)? In the new company I work for, almost 60% of the workforce is working from home throughout the US. Our HR department is out-sourced, but we have 1 main in-house employee that does HR tasks to help bridge the gap between the out-sourced HR service and internal employees. Employees are typically terminated over the phone by their managers. The IT department is then tasked with the collection of the hardware. This includes contacting the terminated employee over a personal email, or personal cell phone number. We are also tasked with working with the shipping manager to prepare a pre-paid shipping label and box to ship the equipment to the employee’s residence to send back the hardware.
It’s been a major challenge getting hardware back from the terminated employees. For obvious reasons, the fired employees are hard to get ahold of, and are difficult to work with. We are sending 1,2, 3 emails and/or calling the employee multiple times.
When the IT department proposed the holding the paycheck to VP’s until the hardware is returned, we were told it’s illegal. In all my previous companies I’ve never had to worry about this. This was always handled by HR or the fired managers employee. Is this normal? How can I get this task off our plate and worry about more important IT related tasks?