Remote work disputes are conflicts between an employer and an employee, or between colleagues, that arise from working at a distance: disagreements about where the work is done, about availability outside working hours, about monitoring, and about behaviour in digital channels. Dutch law does not treat them as a separate category. The same rules apply as in any other employment conflict, but two questions decide most of these cases: whether the employer was obliged to allow home working, and whether it met its duty of care towards an employee it cannot see. This article sets out both, together with the practical steps that keep a disagreement out of court.
There is no right to work from home in the Netherlands
This is the single most misunderstood point in the whole area, and it is the one that produces the most disputes. An employee in the Netherlands has no statutory right to work from home. The Working Where You Want Act (Wet werken waar je wilt), which would have given requests about the place of work the same weight as requests about working hours, was rejected by the Senate on 26 September 2023. It is not coming back in that form, and nothing has replaced it.
What remains is the Flexible Working Act (Wet flexibel werken, Wfw), and the distinction it draws is the heart of the matter. An employee who has been with the employer for at least twenty-six weeks may ask to change the number of hours worked, the times at which they are worked, or the place where they are worked. The request must be in writing and must be made at least two months before the intended change. But the three subjects are not treated alike:
- Working hours and working times. The employer must grant the request unless it can point to a serious business or service interest (zwaarwegend bedrijfs- of dienstbelang). That is a high threshold and it must be argued, not asserted.
- Place of work. The employer only has to consider the request and discuss it with the employee. If it decides to refuse, it must say so, but it does not need a serious business interest to do so.
There is one procedural trap that catches employers regularly. If the employer has not given its decision in writing one month before the intended commencement date, the change takes effect as the employee requested it. Silence is not a refusal. The Act also applies only to employers with ten or more employees; smaller employers must make their own arrangement, and in practice that arrangement is whatever the employment contract, the staff handbook or the collective labour agreement says.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable but clear. An employer may in principle call its staff back to the office, and a refusal to come is a refusal to perform the agreed work. Whether it may do so in a particular case is a question of good employer conduct under article 7:611 of the Civil Code: what was promised at the interview, what has been tolerated for years, whether the employee has a medical or care-related reason, and how much notice was given all bear on the answer. Our article on the boundaries of good employer conduct sets out how that standard works in practice.
The duty of care does not stop at the office door
The second legal anchor is the employer's duty of care, the zorgplicht. It has two sources that work together. Article 7:658 of the Civil Code makes the employer liable for damage suffered by the employee in the performance of the work unless it shows it met its obligations, and article 7:611 requires it to behave as a good employer. Alongside them sits the Working Conditions Act (Arbeidsomstandighedenwet).
Two provisions of that Act matter most for distributed teams. Article 5 requires a written risk assessment and evaluation (risico-inventarisatie en -evaluatie), and a workforce that works partly from home has to be covered by it: display screen work, ergonomics, working hours and workload at home are all part of the picture. Article 3 paragraph 2 obliges the employer to run a policy aimed at preventing and limiting psychosocial workload, a term that covers workload and work-related stress as well as bullying, aggression, discrimination and sexual harassment. Digital harassment in a team chat is psychosocial workload, and so is an expectation of permanent availability.
That last point deserves emphasis, because it is where remote work disputes most often begin. There is no separate Dutch statute giving employees a right to disconnect, but the duty to limit psychosocial workload already requires an employer to think about availability outside working hours; our article on the right to disconnect examines how far that goes. Where the pressure turns into illness, the employer's obligations shift again to reintegration and continued payment of wages, and the questions dealt with in our guide on illness, burnout and work pressure under Dutch law become the operative ones.
Two qualifications are worth making. The duty of care is not unlimited: an employer cannot inspect a private house at will, and courts do not treat every accident at the kitchen table as a workplace accident. And the duty runs alongside the employee's own obligations, including the duty to work safely and to report problems. But an employer that has never asked how its remote staff actually work, and has never recorded the answer, is in a poor position when it has to explain itself.
Equipment, costs and the home workplace
A recurring and avoidable source of friction is who pays for the home workplace. The Working Conditions Act settles part of it: the costs of complying with the employer's obligations under that Act may not be charged to the employee. A suitable chair, a monitor at the right height and a safe electrical setup are the employer's responsibility where the employee works from home structurally, not a benefit the employee has to negotiate for. Beyond that minimum, what the employer contributes towards internet, energy and equipment is a matter of contract or of the collective labour agreement. A tax-free allowance for home working exists, but the maximum is set annually by the legislator, so put the mechanism in the policy rather than a figure that will be out of date within a year, and have the treatment of any allowance confirmed with a tax adviser.
Record what was supplied and when. When an employee later claims a health complaint caused by an inadequate home workstation, the employer's defence under article 7:658 of the Civil Code rests on showing what it provided, what it instructed and what it checked. An inventory list and a short annual confirmation from the employee cost almost nothing and answer almost the whole question.
Where the friction actually comes from
Disputes in a distributed team rarely start with a grand disagreement. They start with tone. A message without context reads as curt, a delayed reply reads as indifference, and neither party can check the impression against a face. The same underlying issues that always caused conflict at work still cause it, but they surface differently and they surface later, which is what makes them expensive.
Four patterns account for most of them. The first is the communication gap: written channels strip out the signals that soften a message. The second is perceived inequity, often called proximity bias, where employees who are physically present are believed to get the better projects and the promotions. The third is the erosion of boundaries, where availability quietly extends into the evening until it is an expectation. The fourth is the invisibility of workload, where an employee who is drowning is not seen to be drowning until the sick note arrives.
Proximity bias deserves a legal note as well as a management one. If the pattern of who is promoted or who is given the good projects correlates with a protected ground, for example because the employees who work from home are disproportionately those with caring responsibilities or a disability, the complaint stops being a cultural one and becomes a discrimination claim under the equal treatment legislation. Employers who assume this is only an engagement issue underestimate it. The various types of workplace conflict each have their own escalation path, and this one is short.
How the same driver looks in the office and at a distance
| Conflict driver | In the office | Remote or hybrid |
|---|---|---|
| Communication | Direct disagreement, an argument in a meeting, visible and quickly known. | Misread messages, silence, colleagues quietly routed around; discovered late. |
| Workload | Visible signs of strain, open argument about who does what. | Unseen overload, disputes about unequal distribution, first evidence is absence. |
| Inclusion | Exclusion from informal contact, feeling unheard in meetings. | Left out of calls and decisions, proximity bias, risk of a discrimination claim. |
| Behaviour | Witnesses are present; incidents are observed as they happen. | Conduct happens in writing, so it is documented but also easily denied out of context. |
The last row cuts both ways and it is the one employers underuse. Almost everything that happens in a remote team leaves a record. That helps an investigation enormously, and it also means that a manager who writes something careless in a chat channel has created evidence that will be read aloud at a hearing.
Preventing disputes: policy, not goodwill
Most of what prevents remote work disputes is unglamorous and written down. A remote working arrangement should state which channels are used for what, what the core hours are, when a response is expected and when it is not, how performance is measured, what equipment and expenses the employer provides, and what the position is on working from abroad. It should say who decides, and on what grounds, when the employer wants people back on site.
Where the arrangement is a general scheme rather than an individual agreement, the works council usually has to be involved. Under article 27 of the Works Councils Act (Wet op de ondernemingsraden) the council has a right of consent for, among other things, working time arrangements, rules on absence and, importantly here, any facility aimed at observing or monitoring the attendance, conduct or performance of employees. A monitoring tool introduced without that consent can be challenged, and the fact that it was introduced without consent tends to be the first thing an employee raises in a later dispute.
Onboarding is the other point where prevention is cheap. A new joiner who has never met the team has no informal channel through which to ask whether a curt message meant anything, and no basis for giving colleagues the benefit of the doubt. Pairing a new employee with a colleague other than the manager, scheduling contact that is not about tasks, and setting explicit expectations for the first months all reduce the number of misunderstandings that later arrive as complaints. There is a legal dimension too: the probationary period under article 7:652 of the Civil Code is short and strictly limited, and it cannot be used to postpone a decision the employer has simply not had the information to make. A remote onboarding process that gives the manager no view of the new employee tends to produce a dismissal decision that is taken late and defended badly.
The other half of prevention is that the policy is applied consistently. A rule that is enforced against one team and ignored in another is worse than no rule, because it converts an operational decision into an argument about unequal treatment. Review the arrangement periodically, record why exceptions were made, and make sure that managers know they are bound by it too.
Spotting and defusing a dispute early
Managers are the early warning system, and in a distributed team they have to read different signals. A contributor who goes quiet in a shared channel and moves everything to direct messages, a sudden shift to curt one-line replies, two colleagues who stop tagging each other, a steady drift out of video calls: none of these proves anything on its own, but a pattern is worth a conversation.
The conversation itself is where most of the damage is either contained or done. Three things make it work. Ask open questions about obstacles rather than closed questions about deadlines, because the difference between an overloaded employee and an employee avoiding a colleague is not visible from the output. Separate the performance conversation from the interpersonal one; merging them turns a solvable friction into a formal performance track that the employee will resist. And close every conversation with a short written summary of what was discussed and agreed, sent to everyone involved.
That last habit is the cheapest legal protection available to an employer. If the matter ends in a court hearing, the file will consist of what was written down at the time. A contemporaneous, neutral summary written when nobody was yet thinking about litigation carries far more weight than a reconstruction produced afterwards.
Where the parties are past the point of talking to each other directly, mediation is usually the proportionate next step, and it works well enough by video provided the format is managed: breakout rooms for private caucuses, clear ground rules on interruption, and a mediator who explicitly checks understanding because the usual non-verbal confirmation is missing. For fact-based and low-emotion disputes, shuttle mediation, where the mediator moves between the parties in writing, can be more effective than putting everyone on one call. Our guide on mediation in labour disputes explains how the process is normally structured and what a mediation agreement does and does not bind you to.
Investigating a complaint when nobody is in the building
Once a formal complaint arrives, the process has to be able to survive being examined by a judge. The starting point is the same as anywhere else: a defined scope, an investigator who is not personally involved, both sides heard, and a written outcome. What changes in a remote setting is the evidence and the interviews.
Securing the digital record
Act quickly and narrowly. Tell the relevant people in writing not to delete material relating to the complaint, and make sure the systems administrator knows that automatic deletion schedules should not run over the relevant mailboxes and channels. Then define what will actually be reviewed: named accounts, a defined period, a defined subject.
Reviewing an employee's e-mail and chat traffic is processing of personal data, and the General Data Protection Regulation applies in full. The employer needs a lawful basis, in practice a legitimate interest that has been weighed against the employee's privacy and recorded; consent from an employee is rarely valid, because the relationship is not equal. The review must be limited to what the complaint requires, employees must have been told in advance that monitoring can occur and on what terms, and a systematic or large-scale review may require a data protection impact assessment. Our guide on email data protection under the GDPR sets out how to keep that review lawful, and the same principles apply to workplace monitoring generally, as our article on camera surveillance in the workplace shows.
Getting this wrong is not a technicality. Dutch courts have refused to accept evidence obtained through disproportionate monitoring and have penalised employers who relied on it, which means an employer can win the factual argument and still lose the case.
Interviews by video
Interview each person alone and in a private room, on a business-grade encrypted platform, and say at the start what the process is, that confidentiality is expected, that recording is not permitted without agreement, and that there will be no reprisals for taking part. Send the interviewee your written note of the interview and give them the chance to correct it. A signed or confirmed note is worth far more than an unverified recollection.
Two further points are specific to Dutch practice. A complaint about misconduct that touches the public interest, such as a breach of the law, may fall under the Whistleblower Protection Act (Wet bescherming klokkenmelders), which since 18 February 2023 requires employers with fifty or more employees to have an internal reporting procedure and protects the reporter against detrimental treatment. And although there is still no general statutory duty to appoint a confidential adviser, the bill making one compulsory was adopted by the House of Representatives on 23 May 2023 and is still before the Senate, so employers should assume the direction of travel. The duty to have a psychosocial workload policy under the Working Conditions Act already points the same way.
What happens if the dispute is not resolved
Most remote work disputes end in an agreement. The ones that do not follow the ordinary routes of Dutch employment law, and it is worth knowing where they lead before choosing a position.
If an employee refuses to attend the office and the instruction was a reasonable one, the employer may in principle suspend payment of wages for the hours not worked, but only after a clear written warning and an opportunity to comply; doing it immediately, or as a bargaining tactic, tends to be held against the employer. Conversely, an employer that has effectively excluded an employee from the work cannot rely on the same rule.
Where the relationship itself has broken down, the usual route is dissolution of the employment contract by the subdistrict court on the ground of a seriously and permanently disturbed working relationship, under article 7:669 paragraph 3 subsection g of the Civil Code. The court will look at what each side did to repair it, and an employer that never offered mediation is at a disadvantage. If the contract is dissolved, the employee is in principle entitled to the statutory transition payment under article 7:673 of the Civil Code, which accrues from the first day of employment; the maximum amount is fixed by law and indexed annually, and where the employer acted seriously culpably the court can award additional fair compensation.
In practice, many of these matters are settled by a settlement agreement (vaststellingsovereenkomst) instead. Two points there are not negotiable: the agreement must be in writing, and the employee has a statutory reflection period of fourteen days after signing in which the agreement can be revoked without giving reasons. If the employer does not mention that right in the agreement, the period is three weeks. The wording also has to protect the employee's unemployment benefit position, which is a matter of how the termination is characterised rather than of what the parties privately intended.
Working from another country is a different problem
An employee who works from a home in another country creates issues that no remote working policy can wish away, and this is the area where employers most often discover the problem only after it has become expensive. Three separate questions have to be answered, and they can produce three different answers.
The first is which employment law applies. Under the Rome I Regulation the parties may choose the applicable law, but that choice cannot deprive the employee of the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where the work is habitually carried out. An employee who quietly relocates and works from abroad for a long period may acquire the protection of that country's dismissal law, whatever the contract says.
The second is social security. Within the EU, the EEA and Switzerland, an employee is in principle covered where the work is done, and working a substantial part of the time from the country of residence used to shift the whole of the coverage there. Since 1 July 2023 a framework agreement based on article 16 of Regulation (EC) 883/2004 allows cross-border teleworkers to remain insured in the employer's state while teleworking from their state of residence for less than half of their working time, provided both states have signed the agreement and an application is made; in the Netherlands the A1 certificate is issued by the Sociale Verzekeringsbank. The application is not automatic and it is the employer's job to make it.
The third is tax, and it follows its own rules. Where an employee is taxed on home-working days depends on the applicable double taxation treaty, and the answer is frequently different from the social security answer. There is no general threshold of tolerated home-working days across the board. This is a question for a tax adviser rather than for a lawyer, and the sensible sequence is to settle the employment law and social security position first and then have the tax position confirmed before the arrangement starts. Working from abroad also raises questions of permanent establishment for the employer and of data transfers outside the European Economic Area, both of which belong in the policy rather than in an exchange of messages after the fact.
The practical rule is simple: require prior written permission for working from another country, for a defined period and a defined location, and make the permission conditional on the necessary filings being in place.
Common questions answered
What is the best way to document a remote conflict?
Proper documentation is your strongest line of defence. The key is to create a clear, chronological record of events, sticking strictly to objective facts rather than anyone’s subjective take on the situation.
This means saving all relevant digital communications, from emails to direct messages. When you're taking notes during interviews or mediation sessions, make sure they are dated, factual and kept in one place, with access limited to the people who need it. Those notes are personal data, so the General Data Protection Regulation applies to them as well. This builds an impartial evidence trail that is vital for any formal process that might follow.
A critical tip is to document agreed-upon next steps after every single conversation. A quick follow-up email summarising the discussion and outlining actions ensures everyone is on the same page. It also provides a clear record of your efforts to resolve the issue.
How can we train managers for remote conflict resolution?
Training managers to handle conflicts from a distance means equipping them with a new set of skills. They need to get much better at reading digital body language—spotting signs of disengagement on video calls or noticing shifts in communication patterns over chat.
Give them practical frameworks for leading difficult conversations in a virtual setting. Your training should absolutely include:
Scenario-based training: Use real-world examples of remote disputes to let them practice de-escalation techniques.
Active listening exercises: Teach them how to listen for what is not being said, which is a common challenge in virtual interactions.
Technology proficiency: Make sure they're comfortable using tools like video breakout rooms to facilitate private, one-on-one discussions.
This kind of targeted training builds the confidence and competence they need to step in early and effectively, stopping minor disagreements from spiralling into something much bigger.
Are the legal risks different with remote employees?
Yes, the legal risks are often more complex. The employer's duty of care (zorgplicht in the Netherlands) doesn't stop at the office door; it extends right into an employee's home office. Article 3 paragraph 2 of the Working Conditions Act requires a policy against psychosocial workload, and the risk assessment under article 5 has to cover home working, so you remain responsible for mental and physical well-being even when they're not on company property.
Disputes tied to perceived unfairness (like proximity bias), digital harassment, or burnout now carry significant legal weight. On top of that, disagreements over an employee's desire to work remotely versus a company's mandate to return to the office are a recurring source of formal disputes. The Flexible Working Act obliges an employer only to consider a request about the place of work and to discuss it, not to grant it, so the argument usually turns on good employer conduct rather than on a right to work from home.
Failing to manage these unique remote conflicts properly can expose your organisation to significant legal and financial liability.
Law and More advises employers and employees on the whole of this field: remote and hybrid working arrangements and works council consent, requests under the Flexible Working Act, duty of care and psychosocial workload, internal investigations and the privacy rules that govern them, mediation, and termination by settlement agreement or through the subdistrict court. Our Dutch employment law team can tell you quickly whether your position is defensible and what the realistic alternatives are. Contact us to discuss your situation.
