When workers take their liability risks home with them
17 March 2008
What with the lousy weather, the commuting hell and the boss looking over your shoulder the whole time, wouldn’t it be nicer to work at home? More employees are beginning to think that way.
Employers are not totally against the idea either. A remote access or 'distributed workforce' can give a company the competitive edge and produce operational efficiencies. Many companies want to reduce their property footprint to contain costs.
There are several types of business that increasingly use homeworkers, says Shaun Randell, liability underwriter with Amlin. “The most common are textiles, where people are employed to do sewing at home, homeworkers who are employed to do packaging or assembly jobs and of course teleworkers, doing sales, for example,” he says.
But homeworkers are exposed to the same sort of risks as their counterparts in the workplace, including back injuries and repetitive strains. And in the UK the health and safety duties on a company extend to homeworking employees in terms of providing a safe and secure working environment, relating to equipment, for example.
Homeworker risks do need to be tightly managed by employers, Mr Randell stresses. “Businesses should have coordinators to advise homeworkers on good risk management practice and to carry out risk assessments, making sure that equipment is safe and well maintained, for example.”
Thanks to the internet, the homeworking population is growing beyond manual workers, bringing new risks, however. According to a recent Gartner report, the worldwide corporate teleworking population of individuals that spend at least one day a month teleworking from home will show compound annual growth of 4.3% between 2007 and 2011. Gartner says that the number of individuals worldwide that spend at least one day a week teleworking from home will likely reach 46.6 million by the end of 2011.
That raises security issues, says Tim Chadwick, risk manager at Aon. The most obvious are to do with securing the physical assets of the employer such as computers. “But there is also the question of securing information. Is confidential information adequately stored and locked away?” he says. “Linked to that there are IT risks associated with hacking and viruses, just like you have in the office.”
A new global survey carried by InsightExpress for IT giant Cisco found that remote workers feel less urgency to be vigilant in their online behaviour. Although the majority believes they are more vulnerable outside the office than inside, their perceptions of security threats are softening. More than half of companies surveyed (55%) believe their remote workers are becoming less diligent toward security awareness, an 11% increase from the year before.
“The blurring of the lines between work and home, and between business lives and personal lives, presents a growing challenge for businesses seeking to capitalize on the productivity benefits of the remote workforce." said John N. Stewart, Cisco's chief security officer, commenting on the findings.
Tim Chadwick says that simple loss prevention measures can be taken such as making sure routers are locked down on home PCs. “Employers need to think about the IT security measures they have in place in the office and make sure they are replicated in the home,” he advises.
Last updated on 21 Dec 2009
