Working From Home Policies & Managing Remote Workers Policy

Managing remote workers policies can provide employers with several practical issues that need to be ironed out. To that end, managing home workers can be complex. Written working from home policies will ensure that the ground rules are in place from the outset and provide a ‘go-to’ document if any confusion or questions arise with working from home employees.

If remote employees are not the norm in an organisation, it is essential to remember this when communicating with employees. If you’re sending an email, follow working with the remote team’s best practices and include them on the distribution list, but remember that they will not need to know everything that office-based staff need to know, e.g. to ensure the staff kitchen is kept tidy at all times. Remember that employee engagement has strong links to communication and involvement.

Ensure remote employees have a list of names and telephone numbers of people they must contact as part of their duties.

Observe remote work policies and organise catch-ups to ensure the homeworker feels connected to the workplace. These may be daily while the new homeworker adjusts and may get made less frequent as time passes.

As part of managing remote employees working from home, ensure the employee has all the equipment required to complete the job correctly, including display screen equipment, laptops, printers, etc. Think about what will happen if they break:

• Will the employee have remote IT support?
• Consider their location, too.
• Does it have good wifi access?
• What will contingency plans be for managing employees working remotely if their internet access falters?

Remember that your duty of care extends to remote employees, and you must ensure that their workstations are set up correctly from a health and safety point of view.

Where the home is also the workplace, employees may face temptations that take their focus off work. This makes the performance of remote employees more challenging. It would be best to create a home working policy of best practices for managing remote employees. The homeworking policy should set out precisely what you expect regarding productivity, which you should supervise effectively. Monitoring on a greater level may need to be undertaken when managing staff working from home to ensure they perform to the required standard.

Suppose the employee has sensitive or confidential documents. In that case, you must include working-at-home guidelines for managing remote workers, ensuring they can take appropriate measures to provide these documents with safe and adequate storage. The provision of lockable cabinets, etc., should cover this.

In addition, working-from-home guidelines require the employee to use the equipment you provide to carry out their work only for work purposes or that the homeworker’s passwords remain secret to prevent anyone else in the household from accessing your work systems.

There are many positives to having remote employees, but managing employees working from home does throw up a couple of questions you may want to consider:

• Does your liability insurance cover remote employees?
• Does the employee’s home insurance permit homeworking?
• Consider your stance on reimbursing expenses connected to the role, e.g., replacing printer cartridges, wifi costs, etc.

As an employer and manager of remote workers, keeping your workforce motivated and productive comes with a few challenges. You must do one thing, as the employer trusts your staff to do their jobs. Managing remote workers’ best practices must include keeping rules consistent, setting expectations, and offering tips on working from home. You can even provide training and advice on time management if it helps the employee.