Remote Working Overseas ' Our Employer Survey

• Published date: 24 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Immigration, General Immigration, Work Visas
• Law Firm: Lewis Silkin
• Author: Ms Rosie Moore and Colin Leckey

We have surveyed employers from a cross-section of businesses to find out how they are responding to requests from employees to work remotely from overseas.

Our survey took a snapshot of the position from 5 May to 20 May 2022. We received responses from employers across 21 sectors, collectively employing more than 800,000 employees.

Our key findings

The survey confirmed that this is an issue that the vast majority of employers are having to address. 98% of respondents confirmed that they have received requests from employees to work remotely overseas since the start of the pandemic.

Our results also indicated that employers are moderately concerned that employees might leave to join competitors if they do not allow them the flexibility of working remotely overseas. This suggests that employers view the flexibility to work remotely overseas as a means of retaining valued members of staff, rather than simply as a recruitment tool.

This is a developing area which can be complex, fact dependent and challenging for employers to negotiate. It can pose a number of issues and potential risks to employers, including in relation to tax and social security, local employment rights, data privacy and immigration, which are discussed further in our Inbrief guide. However, perhaps reassuringly for employers, our survey suggested that in practice the vast majority of remote working overseas arrangements have not yet been scrutinised by overseas authorities.

Nevertheless, the complex and potentially risky nature of this type of arrangement may explain why our results showed that, although the majority of employers (approximately 4 in 5) are allowing some kind of remote working overseas arrangements, there appears to be no clear consensus about which restrictions, if any, are imposed on these.

How are employers restricting the right to work remotely from overseas?

Our survey asked respondents to provide information about the restrictions (if any) that they impose on remote working overseas arrangements.

• Time limit: A third of the employers that allowed employees to work remotely overseas set no specific time limit on the duration of their stay and determined each request on a case by case basis. Where employers did set a specific limit, our results showed a wide range of approaches. The most popular timeframe (26% of respondents) was up to one month in any 12-month period.
• Restrictions on specific countries: Over half of employers did not impose specific restrictions on...