DOL telework bulletin clarifies pay, breaks and leave rules for remote workers

Telework does not reset the rules

The clearest message in the Department of Labor’s telework bulletin is the one many managers still miss: moving work out of the office does not move an employer out of its obligations. For nonexempt employees, all hours worked must be paid whether the work happens in a headquarters cubicle, a home office, or any other location.

That matters in a company like monday.com, where hybrid schedules and distributed collaboration are part of daily life for engineers, product managers, and sales teams. In a software business built around speed, constant communication, and frequent launches, the temptation is to treat home-based work as more informal than office work. The bulletin says the law does not see it that way.

Off-the-clock work is still work

The Wage and Hour Division’s Field Assistance Bulletin No. 2023-1, issued on February 9, 2023, lays out a simple compliance reset for remote teams. If a nonexempt employee answers messages after hours, finishes a task late at night, or gets pulled into a call while “off the clock,” that time can still count as compensable work. The location may have changed, but the wage-and-hour obligation has not.

That is the core reality check for remote-first and hybrid companies. In SaaS, where product launches, customer escalations, and cross-functional handoffs often spill beyond the traditional workday, leaders can no longer rely on proximity to monitor labor. They need clear expectations about when work starts, when it stops, and how overtime gets captured.

Breaks still have to be tracked with care

The bulletin is equally direct on breaks. Short breaks of 20 minutes or less are generally compensable, which means they usually count as paid working time. Longer breaks can be unpaid, but only when the employee is completely relieved from duty.

That distinction can get blurry fast in remote settings. A lunch break interrupted by Slack pings, a quick customer call, or a “can you just fix this” request can turn what managers thought was unpaid downtime into paid time. For teams that run on responsiveness, the bulletin is a reminder that availability expectations and break rules need to be reconciled instead of assumed away.

For monday.com managers, that is not just a legal nicety. A work-OS company sells visibility, structure, and coordination, so the internal version has to be just as disciplined. If workflows are tight for customers, the company’s own time-tracking and break practices need to be equally tight.

Family leave rules still apply when work happens away from an employer site

The bulletin also addresses the Family and Medical Leave Act in a telework context. Employees do not lose leave protections because they work from home, and eligibility still turns on the familiar thresholds. The bulletin reinforces that an employee generally must have worked for a covered employer for at least 12 months and at least 1,250 hours.

Later legal analysis of the guidance also notes that the 50-employees-within-75-miles test still matters even for remote workers. That is an important point for companies with dispersed teams, because a remote employee is not automatically exempt from the usual FMLA framework just because no office sits nearby.

For managers, the practical lesson is to track leave with the same rigor used for hours worked. Telework can make attendance look flexible on the surface, but leave eligibility, documentation, and coverage decisions still require consistency. A casual “we’ll just figure it out later” approach is exactly how avoidable disputes begin.

Nursing employees need the same protections at home

The bulletin also covers nursing employees and the break-time protections for expressing milk under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Telework does not erase those protections. If someone is working from home, the employer still has to think through how break time is handled and how the employee’s right to that time is protected.

That point is especially relevant in knowledge-work environments where employees are trusted to manage their own schedules but are also expected to stay responsive. Remote work can make it easier to fit work around life, but it can also make it harder to separate protected break time from ordinary job demands unless managers document expectations clearly.

Why this matters at monday.com

monday.com says it offers a hybrid work model, with most teams spending three days a week together in the office, and its careers pages also advertise remote or hybrid roles. That makes the DOL bulletin more than a legal memo tucked away for HR. It is a day-to-day operating guide for a workforce that is already split between home and office.

In a company like monday.com, the issue reaches beyond compliance teams. Engineers pushing code from home, product managers aligning releases across time zones, and sales professionals working from the field all need the same underlying protections and the same recordkeeping discipline. If the company gets that wrong, the cost is not just legal exposure. It can affect morale, planning, and the trust that remote and hybrid work depend on.

It also has a shareholder dimension. For employees with MNDY equity, labor discipline matters because operational mistakes can spill into retention, productivity, and management attention. A clean remote-work system supports the same thing investors want from a SaaS company: predictable execution.

The numbers show why the bulletin still matters

Remote work remains far from niche. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said 35.5 million people teleworked or worked at home for pay in the first quarter of 2024, equal to 22.9% of people at work, up from 19.6% a year earlier. Pew Research Center found that 35% of workers whose jobs can be done remotely were working from home all the time in 2023, while 41% were on a hybrid schedule.

Those figures explain why the bulletin has become such a useful reference. Telework is now a standard operating model across much of the knowledge economy, not a temporary exception. The compliance burden did not disappear when employees left the office, and the companies that handle remote work best will be the ones that treat time, leave, and break rules as part of the system, not as an afterthought.