Work from home OH&S fix needed

If your employee was working from home and injured themselves on their home office chair, would you as an employer be liable for compensation?

If your employee was working from home and slipped on the bathroom tiles during a toilet break, would you be liable for compensation?

If your employee was reading a work email as they got off the train and stumbled and injured themselves, would you be liable for compensation?

These are the sort of questions raised by Madeleine Heffernan’s excellent feature on the new work from home OH&S trap that has been created by an Administrative Appeals Tribunal decision which saw a Telstra worker awarded compensation after she slipped twice on the stairs while working from home.

As Madeleine explained, the results of the case have created a potential minefield for employers.

We operate in an era when offering flexible work practices has become a key part of employers’ talent retention strategies, not to mention a right under the Fair Work Act, in certain circumstances.

But employers cannot afford to ignore the Tribunal’s ruling in this case and the implied duty to provide the same level of workplace safety in the home of work-from-home employees as they would in the office.

But if that means employers need to pay for inspections of employees’ homes to ensure they are safe then we’ve got some real problems.

SME employers – for whom work from home arrangements are a crucial talent management tool – simply cannot afford to spend big money to send inspectors out, let alone pay for modifications if the home workspace is deemed to be unsafe.

The best solution would appear to be one suggested by Rae Phillips, founder and director of human resources consultant Inspire Success.

She gives employees a checklist for self-audit rather than send someone in to tick the boxes. This checklist – which confirms there is an appropriate desk, chair and lamp, for example, and that electrical cords have been tagged and tested – must be completed and handed back.

The idea is that employees who want to work from home would need to complete some sort of self-assessment and then sign up a document that freed the employer from liability in the event of an OH&S issue.

While the solution is not perfect (one big question is who would pay for any modifications needed to make the home safe) it should be the starting point to finding a practical, workable solution to this looming OH&S problem.

With national OH&S laws approaching, another question is whether governments will need to step in here and establish some strong rules and processes around working from home.

In the meantime, employers are going to need to start thinking about what work from home arrangements they have in place.

Where the arrangements are more permanent – say they work one day a week at home, every week – getting some checklist in place is a great idea.

Where the arrangements are more irregular – say a staff member needs an afternoon at home for a specific reason – the employer will need to tread carefully.

The OH&S risk might be too difficult to assess and frankly, not worth it.