The Greek Labour Code gives employees stronger protection than most employers moving into the market expect. Notice periods and severance are calculated on fixed statutory formulas tied to length of service, dismissals for white-collar staff must follow specific procedural requirements to be valid, and works councils or sector and occupational collective bargaining agreements (ΣΣΕ) can sit above an individual employment contract and override its terms even where the employer never signed the agreement directly. Businesses that apply a "standard" international employment playbook in Greece without adjusting for this regularly find their termination, or their contract terms, simply unenforceable as drafted. An employment lawyer in Athens will check the procedure as closely as the reason, because form defects invalidate valid dismissals.
Remote and hybrid work arrangements add a second layer that many employers underestimate. Home-working regulations impose specific documentation and equipment obligations, and any monitoring of employees — email, location, activity tracking, even biometric access control — has to clear a proportionality test under GDPR before it can be relied on, let alone used as evidence in a dispute. A monitoring policy that would be unremarkable in some jurisdictions can be an unlawful processing activity in Greece if it is not scoped and documented correctly.
"Most employment exposure we see was not created by a difficult termination. It was created months earlier — a verbal warning nobody wrote down, a non-compete copied from a template that does not meet Greek enforceability standards, a 'freelancer' who was functionally an employee." Most disputes that reach an employment lawyer in Athens were created months earlier by an undocumented decision.
We advise from the perspective of a General Counsel who has actually run an HR function at scale, not just reviewed it from outside. That means giving employers a straight answer on what a termination will actually cost and how defensible it is before it happens, building non-competes and restrictive covenants that meet Greek enforceability standards rather than importing a foreign template, and treating employee data compliance as a live operational issue rather than a policy exercise completed once and filed away. Speak to us before the termination, not after the claim.
Termination risk
Termination is not simple in Greece
Notice periods and severance follow fixed statutory formulas tied to length of service, and procedural requirements for dismissing white-collar employees must be followed precisely for the termination to be valid.
Collective bargaining
Collective agreements can override contracts
Sector and occupational collective bargaining agreements (ΣΣΕ) can set minimum terms that apply to your workforce even if your company never negotiated or signed one directly.
Data and monitoring
Employee monitoring and GDPR
Email, location and activity monitoring of employees must clear a proportionality assessment under GDPR — an unscoped monitoring policy is a compliance exposure of its own, separate from any employment dispute it might feed into.
Cross-border staff
Cross-border and expat employment
Expat packages, secondments and contracts expressed to be governed by English law raise questions Greek-only employment advice does not answer — handled here under a single, dual-qualified instruction.