TL;DR
Most teams leave equipment during parental leave exactly where it is, and for leave under about six months that is usually right. The decision gets harder on long leaves, on shared parental arrangements and where the machine is due a refresh. The worst option is having no position, because then every case becomes a negotiation at a bad moment.
- Three workable positions exist: leave it, collect it, or collect and reissue later.
- Leaving it is simplest and costs you a device sitting idle for months.
- Collecting it reads badly unless the policy said so long before the leave began.
- Keep access and hardware as separate decisions. They are not the same question.
- Refresh cycles and warranty windows keep running while somebody is away.
The moment this becomes real
Say someone on your team starts nine months of leave in March. Nobody mentions the laptop, so it goes home with them. Their accounts get suspended on the first day of leave, which is correct and automatic.
In August, IT runs a patch compliance report. One machine has not checked in for five months. It shows as non compliant, it is two months past its warranty, and its disk encryption key escrow has gone stale. Somebody raises a ticket asking the employee to bring it in. They are on leave with a baby.
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Nothing here was unkind or unreasonable on its own. The real issue is not whether a laptop sat in a cupboard for nine months. It is that three systems carried on treating an absent person as present, and the first contact anybody made was a request.
When this is lighter than you think
Four stages where you genuinely do not need a process.
- Leave under three months. Leave the machine with the person. The device is idle either way, and collection costs more than it saves.
- You have no refresh cycle yet. If machines are replaced when they break rather than on a schedule, one of the two complications disappears.
- Small team, one country. A conversation covers it. You do not need a written position to handle two people a year.
- The person will keep occasional access by agreement. Keeping in touch arrangements differ by country and by agreement, and where one exists the laptop usually stays. Check what has actually been agreed.
It gets heavier with leaves over six months, with multiple people away at once, or when finance starts asking why devices are depreciating unused.
The five questions teams actually ask
Can we ask for the laptop back? You can ask. Whether you should depends on what your policy said beforehand and on how the request will read. A position written into the handbook months earlier lands very differently from a request that arrives in week three of somebody’s leave. Entitlements around leave vary by country, so check locally before treating this as purely operational.
What happens to access? Suspension is normal and is usually automatic. Treat it as separate from the hardware. A suspended account on a machine still in someone’s home is a common and acceptable state, provided the disk is encrypted and you can still reach it if you need to.
Does the refresh clock keep running? Yes, and most teams forget. Somebody returning after a year to a machine that is now three years old will need a replacement almost immediately. Plan it before they come back, not during their first week.
What about warranty? Warranty periods do not pause for leave. A machine that goes into a cupboard with eight months of cover left comes out with none. If it is worth covering, note the expiry rather than discovering it later.
Who checks it still works? Nobody, usually. Batteries discharge, certificates expire, and operating systems fall far enough behind that the first update takes a working day. Build that day into the return plan.
Three positions, and where each breaks
Leave it with the person. The default and usually the right one. Zero friction, zero logistics, no awkward conversation. It breaks on long leaves, where you are depreciating an idle asset, and on compliance reporting, where the machine shows as a permanent exception nobody can close.
Collect it at the start of leave. Clean on paper. The device goes back into the pool and gets used. It breaks on tone. Unless the policy was written and visible well in advance, collecting somebody’s laptop as they start parental leave reads as a statement about whether they are coming back. It also means you owe them a working machine on day one of their return, which is a promise teams miss.
Collect it, store it, reissue on return. The middle path. The specific machine waits somewhere neutral and comes back configured. It breaks on cost and on honesty: storage is not free, and if you are storing a machine that will be obsolete by the return date you are paying to warehouse a problem.
Five questions to find your own position
Deciding equipment during parental leave is easier once you know which of these you can already answer.
How long is a long leave here? Pick a threshold and write it down. Six months is common. Any number is better than deciding per person.
Does your compliance report distinguish absent from missing? If not, every long leave generates a false alarm somebody has to investigate.
What is the machine worth in twelve months? If the honest answer is very little, collection and storage are hard to justify on cost.
Do you have spare stock? Teams with a spare pool can afford to leave machines out. Teams running at zero spares cannot, and should say so.
Who contacts the person, and when? One named person, once, before leave starts. Not a ticket in month five.
What is actually available
Five options for the physical side, including ours.
Leave it and flag the record. Best for most teams under 200 people. Costs nothing, and a status field stops the compliance false alarms. Struggles only on genuinely long absences with tight hardware budgets.
Keep a local spare pool. Best where most staff are near an office. You collect, store on site and reissue. Struggles for distributed teams, because the cupboard is in the wrong country.
Ask the employee to store it themselves. Best avoided. It sounds like no cost and quietly transfers responsibility for company property to somebody who is not working. Struggles on liability and on tone.
A local courier and self storage. Best for one or two machines. Cheap per unit. Struggles on records, because you get a storage invoice rather than a device level audit trail.
RemoAsset. Best when the person is in a country where you hold no space and the leave is long enough that leaving a machine idle is real money. Chosen because collection, device storage between assignments and reissue run as one tracked chain, so the register stays honest while the device is parked. Where it struggles: storage is a recurring cost, so for a short leave it is simply worse than leaving the laptop where it is. It also cannot help with the part that actually matters most here, which is agreeing the position with the person before they go.
Where to start, by situation
| Situation | Scale | Setup | Primary pain | Recommended starting point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leave under 3 months | Any | Any | None in practice | Leave the machine in place and flag the record |
| Leave 6 to 12 months, near an office | Under 200 staff | Local IT | Idle asset and false compliance alerts | Collect to the office spare pool |
| Leave 6 to 12 months, no local presence | Distributed | No local space | Nowhere to put it | A storage and retrieval service such as RemoAsset |
| Several long leaves at once | 200 plus | Spare pool at zero | Hardware budget pressure | Set a written threshold and apply it evenly |
| Machine already near end of life | Any | Fixed refresh cycle | Storing a device nobody will want | Collect for disposal and plan a new issue |
What the gap actually costs
The money is small and easy to overstate. A laptop sitting idle for nine months is a cost, but collecting, storing and reissuing it is also a cost, and for most machines the two are closer than people assume.
The second cost is the one that lands on a person. Someone returning from leave to a dead battery, a year of updates and an expired certificate spends their first day fighting a laptop instead of catching up. That day is recoverable. The impression it leaves is less so.
The third is governance. A device that has not reported in for months sits on your exception list, and a long list of exceptions is how genuinely missing machines hide. So the question is not whether to collect the laptop. It is whether your systems can tell the difference between a device on leave and a device gone.
When the cupboard is in the wrong country
Handling equipment during parental leave stops being simple when the person is nowhere near anything you own. A spare pool works if there is a shelf. For a distributed team there usually is not, and the fallback is asking an employee to keep company property at home for a year.
What changes with a service is that collection and storage become a recorded step rather than a favour. The machine is picked up, held, and sent back configured for a date you choose. A laptop lifecycle management service for distributed teams treats the parked device as part of the estate rather than an exception.
Whether that is worth paying for depends on one number you can work out yourself: how many device months you are currently holding idle, and what those machines will be worth when they come back. If the answer is a handful of laptops that will still be fine, leave them where they are. If it is twenty machines across six countries, that is an estate decision rather than a kindness decision.
See how device collection works for staff on long leave
Read our guide to equipment during a leave of absence
Related reading
- Equipment during a leave of absence
- Equipment during long term sick leave
- Setting a hardware refresh cycle
- Writing an employee equipment policy
- Statutory leave entitlements differ by country. The UK government publishes maternity leave guidance and the US Department of Labor publishes guidance on the Family and Medical Leave Act. Check your own jurisdiction before setting a position.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should happen to equipment during parental leave?
Most teams leave the laptop with the person, which is usually right for absences under about six months. Longer leaves make collection and storage worth considering, particularly where the machine is near a refresh. The decision that matters is having a written position before anybody needs it.
Can we ask an employee to return their laptop while they are off?
You can ask, but how it reads depends entirely on whether the position existed beforehand. A rule written in the handbook and applied to everyone is very different from a request that arrives mid leave. Entitlements and protections around leave vary by country, so take local advice before making collection a requirement.
Should we suspend access as well as collecting the device?
Treat them as separate decisions. Access suspension during leave is normal and usually automatic. The hardware question is about cost and storage, not security, provided the disk is encrypted. Many teams suspend access and leave the machine in place, which is a perfectly coherent position.
What happens to the refresh cycle while somebody is away?
It keeps running. A person returning after a year often finds their machine is now near the end of its life and needs replacing within weeks. Check the refresh date before the return date and plan the swap in advance rather than reacting to it.
Is it reasonable to ask the employee to store the laptop at home?
It is common and it is worth thinking about twice. You are asking somebody who is not working to take responsibility for company property for a long period. If you do it, say so explicitly in the policy and be clear about what happens if the device is damaged or lost while stored.
How do we stop a laptop on leave showing as non compliant?
Add a status to the asset register that marks the device as parked, with an expected return date, and exclude that status from patch compliance alerting. Without it, every long absence generates alerts that somebody investigates and then ignores, which is how real problems get missed.
Does it make financial sense to collect and store a machine?
Only for longer absences, and only if the device will still be useful on return. Collection, storage and reissue all cost something. Compare that against the remaining value of the machine after the leave ends. For a laptop near end of life, collecting it for reuse or disposal usually beats storing it.
What should happen on the first day back?
Assume the machine needs a working day of updates, a battery that has discharged and credentials that have expired. Build that into the return plan and tell the person in advance. It costs nothing to warn somebody and it removes the worst part of a first day back.
