Potential liability issues around employees working from home

For obvious reasons, many companies are now allowing their employees to work from home for the time being. In fact, some are extending that kind of flexibility for months beyond the projected wind-down of the pandemic – or even permanently. However, before your business makes any hard and fast decisions about altering the allowances you will extend to workers after restrictions around the coronavirus are lifted, you should understand some of the potential liability risks that could spring from these decisions.

Perhaps the most notable is that while your business may be covered by specific insurance policies, some of their provisions may not extend to employees who are working from home, according to The Hartford. To that end, employers have a responsibility to do all they can to protect both their workers and their businesses before allowing permanent work-from-home options, including encouraging employees to have a dedicated workspace at their homes that can be carefully documented.

Getting it right
For instance, someone should make sure that workspace is well-lit, well-ventilated and otherwise free of potential hazards that could create liability issues if workers are allowed to do all their daily functions for the company there, the report said. Likewise, it's important to make sure there are smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, fire extinguishers and the like on the premises, and that all these considerations are carefully documented with photo or video. It would also be a good idea to ensure those workers have up-to-date renters' or homeowners insurance policies in place.

Formal work-from-home policies can reduce your company's potential liability.

What does the law say?
An important consideration for any company allowing work-from-home flexibility on a regular or even permanent basis is that employees who don't come into the office are still protected by the same workers' compensation rules as those who commute every single day, according to The Staffing Stream. If workers can show that an accident that led to injury or illness in their homes was related to their work, employers will still bear that liability, even if they were not directly responsible for the accident. If it is related to their work, that's where the liability starts.

Another consideration
In addition to physical safety for your employees when they work from home, you will also need to make sure your company's systems are protected, The Staffing Stream added. After all, if your employees are given access to sensitive information remotely, you need to make sure their personal devices would be just as protected from hacking attacks or other types of data breaches as if they were accessing it from within your facility.

After all, a breach affecting your customers, clients or employees is still something your company will have to be responsible for addressing, whether the exposed files were accessed from your office, an employee's home, a hotel or anywhere else, the report said. Ideally, companies would give work-from-home employees their own dedicated devices to complete business from, rather than allowing them to access critical files from personal devices – but obviously, that's not feasible for all businesses.

What's the policy?
As far as simply making sure workers are still productive, happy and healthy in their jobs at home, it's just a good idea for companies to have a formalized work-from-home policy, according to West Sound Workforce. That way, everyone knows what those employees' responsibilities are – whether they're working from home permanently or just a few times per month – as well as what will be needed from their supervisors and so on, to ensure ambiguity is kept to a minimum.

When you are crafting a clear and dedicated work-from-home policy, you should go over it carefully with any employee who will take advantage of the new flexibility you may be extending them, and also make it clear that you will periodically assess whether the arrangement is working for all involved, the report said. That way, there's less of a risk of complacency or letting standard procedures slip after a worker has been staying home for months or more at a time.

One last consideration
Finally, companies have a responsibility to make sure that they are treating the employees who work from home exactly the same as the ones who come into the office on a daily basis, according to Reminger. This isn't always easy because if a person hasn't been into the office for weeks, they may fall into the category of "out of sight, out of mind" to some extent, and their decision to take advantage of the company's policy certainly cannot be held against them when it comes to things like career advancement, receiving a pay raise, training opportunities and so on.

For all these reasons and more, you need to carefully review what unique liabilities your small business may face when it comes to allowing employees to work from home, during and after the coronavirus pandemic. The more you can do to make sure your company's policies are as clear as possible, the better off you will be when it comes to identifying areas of potential liability and addressing them on an ongoing basis.

Categorised in: Asset & Liability Protection

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