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Remote working: The way of the future?

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9th Jun 2010
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Businesses are tuning in to the potential of remote working to reduce costs and increase productivity, but there are practical and legal implications to be considered, explains Louise Gibson.

Increasing numbers of employees are working remotely either on a full-time or part-time basis, an arrangement that can have significant advantages for employers. Businesses no longer need to worry about train strikes or freak snow storms preventing workers from getting into the office – their ability to work from home means no business hours are lost. Employers that do offer remote working report reduced overhead costs, increased productivity, better staff motivation and higher employee retention.  Despite the obvious advantages, there are practical and legal considerations that firms should undertake before implementing remote working.

Managing requests

Employers should treat any requests for flexible working arrangements (informal or otherwise) with care. Failure to do so can be costly.

Employees with responsibility for caring for children aged 16 and under (17 and under for disabled children) and those who care for dependent adults have a “right to request” flexible working arrangements. In these circumstances employers must go through a prescribed process to deal with the request. Failure get the process right could result in a claim and an order to pay the employee up to eight week’s pay (capped at the statutory maximum, currently £380).

Typically, far more women than men seek flexible working arrangements like home working. Therefore a failure, without good reason, by an employer to acquiesce to a request could result in a costly discrimination claim.

Practical considerations

When considering or agreeing to a request to work remotely employers need to bear in mind the following points:
Attending the office: A specific right to require employees to attend office premises (for example, for team meetings etc) should be included in the contract.

  • Monitoring hours/supervision: Consideration should be given as to how working hours and the quality of the output will be monitored. 
  • Expenses and tax: Who will pick up the expenses bill? For example, travel expenses to attend the office, heating and lighting costs, insurance premiums. There will also be tax considerations.
  • Equipment and IT systems: Who will provide equipment and who will pay for it? Also, use and monitoring of communications systems may need to be adapted for remote workers.
  • Insurance: Additional insurance policies may be needed, for example in relation to company equipment used at the employee’s home.
  • Confidential information and data protection: Are additional security requirements needed? For example, locking away confidential information at night.
  • Right to enter: Employers should reserve the right in the contract to enter the employee’s home, for example to carry out health and safety checks, to install or maintain equipment or to recover company property at the end of the employment. 

Legal considerations
Employers are responsible for ensuring that employees’ places of work are safe and (as far as possible) free from health hazards. This responsibility does not stop just because an employee works from home. Therefore, risk assessments should be carried out. 

Some remote workers may find it difficult to maintain healthy work/life balances. They may also become isolated and suffer from not having the same support mechanisms as those in the office (i.e. managers spotting signs of stress and colleague support). Employers need to ensure that appropriate steps are in place to deal with these issues.

Although on the increase, remote working is still likely to be for the minority of employees. However, there are real benefits to employers of remote working and these should be embraced.

Louise Gibson is a solicitor in the employment law department at Howard Kennedy.

 

Replies (4)

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By Sally Fletcher
09th Jun 2010 10:29

It works for me

 I have worked from home for the last two and a half years.  I'm lucky in as much as I am self motivated and do not miss working with colleagues.  I don't suffer the daily commute getting stressed in traffic jams.

I have flexible working arrangements, I do the daily school run and often make work phone calls out of hours to new clients.  In school holidays my son (9) can play with his friends around his house rather than going to a child minder.

It works very well for me, the only problem being knowing when to stop as work is always there and there is no getting away from it.

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Della Hudson FCA
By Della Hudson
09th Jun 2010 11:21

Me too

I'm like Sally and benefit from the flexibility of homeworking to spend maximum time with my family. I've just taken on my first employee and, after her initial training, I intend to put things in place for her to work from her home too.

My local businesslink tell me that they can help with the risk assessments for homeworking.

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Teignmouth
By Paul Scholes
09th Jun 2010 16:30

Proper planning needed

I too am sold on the concept, my main fee earner works from home and now only visits the office maybe once every 2 months, similarly I can log in from home or anywhere else and work with little loss in effeciency and with a a significant reduction in carbon shoe size.

A potential problem arises in communicating between colleagues, ie the sort of info flow that takes place when you overhear another conversation or shout a question across the room.  We use Skype for messaging & calls and this has been great but unless you have a central email facility and client data (eg on a server or good online facility) trying to keep each other and clients updated effeciently can be a problem.

We have a client with 10 employees, 8 of which work remotely most of the time, they have no central server and rely on Google email and Google docs (but only for some documents) and are vanishing into a mist of emails and several versions of the same documents, between themselves & clients.  This has come about because 2 years ago there were 4 of them and with rapid growth there was no planning or enhanced facilities to cope.

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By cymraeg_draig
09th Jun 2010 18:45

Trust

I don't work from home - I work from the house next door which was bought & converted to offices, and expanded  since, so my daily commute is a walk of about 20 yards.  We do have a mixture of home working & office based working. It's really left to the employee how they want to work, and we find that (ignoring snow etc) most tend to do a couple of days at home, but like to come into the office 2 or 3 days a week, so it works well for us.

Some may think that having totally flexible hours for all staff, and allowing home working, we are risking being taken advantage of, but our experience has always been that if you treat staff as trustworthy adult professional staff, they usually behave as such.

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