If you are moved from office to being home-based then some aspects of your employment will change. Some are obvious, such as obeyance to the fire safety regulations, as well as elements such as bullying/discrimination in the workplace, some will remain (such as Display screen regulations). Remote work may affect your usual office role, in that it will likely require greater levels of flexibility and trust from both sides.
Covid19
It is important that all workers and employers follow national lockdown procedures at that time, and build flexible work structures to reflect how the government will deal with the ongoing pandemic. Many businesses will now only allow certain types of workers to travel to their workplace (‘critical workers’) such as:
- Those that maintain national infrastructure
- Construction work
- Manufacturing
- Nursing, Care work
- Childcare or education
- Essential public services
- Essential retail
Addressing changes to your employment
Remote working employees must consider whether their employers have provided everything that they need to work effectively from home. Generally, this will require:
- New forms of communication or software (such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or other business-related communications software) and logins or passwords unique to the company.
- Monitoring software to ensure employees are meeting targets and can flag or report discrepancies to their employers.
- Checklists to ensure that your home-working space is safe and up to company policy standards.
- Potential loaning of IT equipment, such as printers, software, laptops, phones or computers which are strictly for work use. In most cases the employee will have most, if not all the equipment for home use, this makes things far easier.
- Ensuring that the internet connection of employees is sufficient.
- The use of intranets or internal admin services for ease of access and to protect vital information to the running of the business.
Businesses that deal in more specific sectors (such as Finance, Sales etc.) may require more specialised software or equipment. Employees who feel they are not able to effectively work from home with the equipment have to need to speak to their employer immediately to rectify the situation.
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