Epic’s “extreme weather” policy infuriates workers as winter approaches

A recent change would give employees less leeway to work from home, even on days when the roads aren’t safe.

Wisconsinites are preparing for winter weather, especially Epic Systems’ 13,000 employees. They may have to travel through ice and snow to the electronic health records company’s sprawling Verona campus, even though many employees say they can easily do their jobs at home.

“Everyone’s angry,” one Epic employee tells Tone Madison. Current Epic employees who spoke to Tone Madison for this story asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. “They actually announced it in a staff meeting in front of everybody and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard the entire crowd boo.”

The Verona-based tech company told employees at an all-hands meeting on October 16 that the company was changing its emergency weather protocol ahead of this winter. Previously, employees could request permission from their managers to work from home. However, employees told Tone Madison that, even then, guidance for when employees could work from home was inconsistent and unclear.

“Generally, it just depended on whether your manager approved it,” one Epic employee says. “Whether you could use it was usually based on school closings, but it was left pretty vague.”

“There were a lot of issues then with it not being fair across the company, because some team leads were very forgiving, and some team leads would make their team members come in no matter what,” another Epic employee says. “And that’s the explanation they used last month when they took away the extreme weather day.”

Instead of clarifying when employees could work from home—such as, say, directly tying work-from-home permissions to school closures—so its policy would be applied fairly in all departments, Epic went in the opposite direction. Under the new protocol, in the event of extreme weather, employees will need to either use their work-from-home days or come into the office. 

To compensate for the policy change, employees were told they would receive two half-and-half days, essentially another full work-from-home-day. Epic has a system called half-and-half days, where one half of the day is paid working from home. For the second half of the day, employees either need to come into the office, use a half-day of paid time off, or use a second half-and-half day to be paid for a full day working at home. Employees who had been with the company for over five years received two additional half-and-half days, a total of two work-from-home days, under the new policy.

Tone Madison sent several questions and quotes to Epic for comment. A company spokesperson responded: “Our approach allows flexibility for Epic staff to make individual decisions to work from home for all or part of the day during extreme weather events.”

It’s the latest in an ongoing back-and-forth between Epic employees and management over working from home. Wisconsin winters have always been a concern, but the COVID-19 pandemic and an enduring nationwide shift to remote work have made the exchange more contentious. 

“Realistically, our entire job can very easily be done from home,” one employee says. “It’s been a common topic with Epic management in that we totally can do our job from home very easily, but upper management has generally stressed that they feel that working in office promotes good cultural values and is better for collaboration and stuff like that.”

Even with that additional day, employees said the last-minute change means they just have to hope that we’ll have a mild winter without any more than one extreme weather day.

“I’ve used up all my previous work from home days, so I’ll only have one for the rest of the year,” one employee says. “Which could be fine, but that kind of just depends on whether the weather decides to be bad.”

As many employees stated, it’s pretty common for Wisconsin winters to create unsafe driving conditions. And the new policy could have dangerous consequences.

“I don’t think that in Wisconsin, one extra day of working from home is sufficient,” another employee says. “There’s plenty more than one day a year where it’s not safe to drive in and this really doesn’t leave any leeway if you’ve already used all of your days for, I don’t know, taking care of your kid while they’re out sick or something. If you’re out of days, and it’s not safe to drive, you have to drive anyway. That’s just endangerment.”

Epic’s strategy of attracting young talent from all over means that plenty of its workers are not used to winter driving yet.

“Every year, I swear, the first major snowstorm we get, there’s pile-ups, cars in ditches. It’s just awful. Epic hires a lot of new employees from all over the place, and frequently people are coming from California and Texas and have no idea what they’re doing in the snow,” one employee says. “I don’t know if people have been hurt because of that. I know people definitely have lots of accidents. I don’t know if there’s been any major injuries or anything like that.”

Sarah-Louise Raillard, who worked at Epic from October 2018 until November 2019, says it’s one of the main reasons she quit after little more than a year at the company. Raillard doesn’t drive, so she relied on public transportation to get to Epic’s office. So she was shocked when management made her come into the office during the polar vortex in late January and early February of 2019. On Jan. 30, the National Weather Service recorded wind chills as low as -48℉.

“I was starting to worry about waiting for the bus because at those temperatures, you have frostbite that sets in in under five minutes. So it’s very dangerous,” Raillard says. “I’m also someone who has chronic immune system issues. So, really not great for me to be in these super dangerously low temperatures.”

This is when Raillard says she “butted up against Epic’s draconian work-from-home policy.” Even during this most extreme of extreme weather events, she learned that “there was almost no capacity for extending the right to work from home.” She also did not see management taking the situation seriously.

“I remember, Epic issued on their company intranet this very flip statement with little penguins and snowmen and stuff, basically saying, ‘Stay warm’, ‘Make sure that you give yourself extra time to travel,’” Raillard says. “I really felt like they were making light of a potentially lethal situation for people.”

When she learned about the new policy, she said “the most egregious” part was the additional day for senior employees.

“They have somehow linked extreme weather work-from-home allowances to seniority, and those things are not related. You’re not more or less affected by extreme weather, if you’ve been working for Epic for two years or for 20 years, right?” Raillard says. “The roads are either too snowy to be driven on or they’re not. It has nothing to do with how long you’ve been working at the company. …That just makes absolutely no sense.”

Raillard tried to negotiate with management and explain the severity of the situation. She even brought the issue to HR, but felt she was “hitting up against the brick wall.” That inflexibility was one reason she resigned. 

“As somebody who was reliant on public transport, and as somebody who has a chronic health condition, it was not going to be sustainable for me to work somewhere that had such an inflexible work-from-home policy, to the point that they wouldn’t even allow exceptions for extreme weather,” she says. “It seemed like the policy was really archaic. It dated from a different time in the office, and it really lacked compassion.”

One year after she left, Epic did make some allowances for work-from-home days due to extreme weather. 

“I had liked to think that I was helpful in making that shift,” she says. “And then, of course, Covid happened, and that provoked a lot of shifts.”

Epic allowed most of its then-9,000 employees to work from home early in the COVID-19 pandemic. But by July, 40% of employees were working in the office and management was pushing for a full return to office by August, 2020. It backed off of those plans after receiving national backlash. 

Epic’s efforts to force workers back to the office in the summer of 2020, months before COVID-19 vaccines were available, provoked an effort to organize workers at Epic. They still don’t have a union, but just the talk of organizing is significant. The United States Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis made the company’s name synonymous with efforts to weaken workers’ rights.

Since January 2022, the company has been pushing for a greater percentage of its now-13,000 employees to commute to the office.

Raillard says the push for working in-office is a symptom of a larger culture at Epic and how management views employees.

“It was like one example of how they really don’t trust their employees. They treat their employees like children. They don’t bother to learn who’s actually working hard and who’s not,” Raillard says. “People would come into work sick all of the time, which is a dangerous and unproductive system, and would actually cause Epic, I think, to lose employees. Because, especially in the tech sector, it’s become much more and more common to allow remote work.”

“It’s astounding to me that now they’re trying to roll things back in the wrong direction.”

This story has been updated to accurately reflect Epic’s half-and-half day system.