Inspections offer answer to work-from-home safety question after COVID lockdowns

George Wason helped establish Safe As Houses WHS earlier this year as working from home, and hybrid working - a mixture of office- and home-based work - emerged as one of COVID's lasting changes.

The business, which Mr Wason has launched with Jim and Alex Roussos in Canberra, will inspect the safety of home offices for employers and staff, checking ergonomic set-ups and detecting hazards.

Employers still had a duty of care to their employees, even if staff were working from home, Mr Wason said. But state health and safety authorities and many small- to medium-sized businesses lacked the capacity to monitor safety in home offices.

"We see this new opportunity for the private sector to step in and basically assist," he said.

"We see ourselves as an entity which could allow employers to transition into a more flexible arrangement."

Safe As Houses WHS will have inspectors trained in occupational safety requirements, legislation and regulations, Mr Wason said. They would check access and egress, ergonomic and desk set-ups, ventilation, power sockets and circuit breakers at home-based workplaces.

Inspectors will not specialise in monitoring the psychological hazards of working from home such as isolation, but will ask workers about their general wellbeing, and can alert them to specialist organisations that can provide help.

The inspection reports would let employers and workers address any safety issues, Mr Wason said.

"The good thing about our view is that we are independent from the employer. The employer does not invade in the privacy of the individual employee," he said.

"We are not judgmental, we go ahead and we make the assessment, we will write the assessment, the employee will get a copy of the assessment.

"It's very much an open book audit, where all the parties will have a copy, we will keep a copy, the employer has a copy, the employee has a copy."

Mr Wason said there was a piecemeal approach to monitoring safety of staff working from home among many employers. Relying on employees to self-assess involved a conflict of interest, he said.

He warned that employers would have to prove they exercised their duty of care if an employee was injured while working from home and the matter went to court.

"All employers throughout Australia are bound by a duty of care. You can't contract that out, it is there and it's going to stay there, and therefore, the employers and the employees need to address the issue," Mr Wason said.

The business, which is waiting for feedback from potential clients, has emerged as Canberra employees permanently adopt hybrid-working in greater numbers after working from home during COVID lockdowns.

Workplace experts, and the government's economic advisory body, have predicted working from home will endure after the nation's lockdowns as workers choose to continue spending part of their week in home offices.

ACT-based Commonwealth public servants are returning to office buildings after employers sent them to work from home when the territory entered its lockdown in August. However 48 per cent per cent of Commonwealth employees nationally are still working exclusively from home.

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UNSW Canberra public administration expert Sue Williamson said WHS concerns shifted from ergonomic set-ups to the spread of COVID when government agencies initially sent workers home as the pandemic hit.

"Now that we're moving into a COVID-normal situation, agencies are obviously starting to think about the ergonomics and workplace health and safety, and trying to take a more formalised and systemic approach to it, rather than the ad hoc reaction that we had last year and the last nine weeks in Canberra at least," she said.

Dr Williamson said there was an opportunity for employers to outsource work health and safety checks as an alternative to self-assessments or sending HR staff out to inspect employees' home workplaces.

Working from home could involve potential health hazards arising from prolonged sitting. There were also psychological risks of working from home caused by isolation, work intensification, and blurred boundaries between work and personal time.

Some employees faced domestic violence while working from home, Dr Williamson said.

Australian National University work-health-and-safety law expert Cameron Roles said large-scale working from home during the pandemic had involved traditional risks, such as muscular-skeletal issues caused by poor ergonomic settings. It also involved newer risks, such as the mental health effects of prolonged isolation.

Mr Roles said employers and employees were still subject to work health and safety obligations, and workers' compensation legislation, even when staff worked from home.

"It's entirely uncontroversial that a worker who has been directed to work from home, or who because of a public health order has been required to work from home, that home becomes their workplace for the purposes of WHS legislation," he said.

"So the legislation is going to apply with full force in that context."

Employers could use the same technologies enabling large-scale working from home - such as Zoom - to assist in monitoring worker safety in home offices, he said.

They could also update their policies, such as hazard and incident reporting, to reflect working from home arrangements.

Employee assistance programs, increased communication, and training for employers and staff about workplace health and safety would also improve safety for employees working from home, Mr Roles said.

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