On November 5th, life for many businesses turned upside-down — again.
For weeks, the mood music had been about trying to revive the economy. ‘Return to the office,’ prime minister Boris Johnson urged both employers and employees, as he tried to bring back footfall and commuters’ purchasing power to deserted towns and city centres.
It is inevitable that lockdown rules will keep changing and despite the wonderful news of vaccines for Covid-19, some office workers can still expect to continue working at home for another six months, at least.
Reactions, to be sure, have been mixed. Some continue to mourn the social life and camaraderie of the office; others have adjusted to reduced interpersonal contact. Either way, across the nation, spare bedrooms and kitchen tables have been turned into home offices. And after eight months of working from home, huge numbers of people are now settling down for many more months of the same.
The new normal
Except it’s not quite the same.
Back in March, the rush was simply to do it: work from home, muddle through somehow, and return to the office by perhaps the summer.
As we all now know, that didn’t happen. Working from home now has an air of permanence about it. Not only has it become ‘the new normal’, but people—both employees and employers—are openly talking about continuing with an element of working from home even when the pandemic finally recedes.
Which means that it’s probably time to put working from home on a proper legal footing. In the rush to ‘just do it’, that almost certainly didn’t happen in most businesses.
Now, though, the circumstances have changed. Working from home, in some form or other, will be with us for some time—or even permanently.
Priority areas to tackle
Consider equipment, for example. Back in March, many employees were using their own home computers. And these generally weren’t equipped with the level of password protection and security provision that are these days seen as appropriate for a business device. Given that your business’s GDPR obligations still apply, it’s time to think about putting things properly on a secure footing.
It’s also time to think about IT and data protection policies fit for the era of working from home. Encryption, for instance, as protection against a home laptop being stolen during a burglary. Security provisions to keep data away from the eyes of family and visiting friends and neighbours. Two-stage authentication for accessing systems. And so on, and so on.
A wise employer will also want to make explicit the treatment of home- and IT-related expenses. Should employees be able to claim for the cost of heating and lighting their home office, and for powering their computer? Or for the loss of access to subsided catering. All things which need to be considered to make sure you don’t fall foul of any laws, or tax regulations.
Finally, it’s also time to formalise employment contracts for the era of working from home. Is there a clear contractual provision allowing the employee to work from home and requiring the employee to attend the office upon request? Does the employment contract allow the employer to ask the employee to return to office-based work? Addressing these issues now can prevent them from becoming problems later.
Prepare ahead of time
And that general statement, in fact, sums up a lot of the general guidance associated with a permanent—or semi-permanent—state of working from home. In large part, many of a business’s policies and procedures were designed for the era of the office. But now, work has migrated to employees’ homes. Yet the policies and procedures haven’t.
For the most part, it is working well. But problems one day will arise. Bones of contention will arise, and differences of view will make themselves felt.
The wise business will address those issues now. And at The Legal Director, we stand ready to help. Pick up the phone, or send us an e-mail.
