Beware: Work from home does not mean work from anywhere

• Many Australians take “work from home” policies to mean they can work from anywhere — but that might not be true.
• Employers and legal experts warn that there are still criteria that need to be met from an employee’s working location.
• Despite this, there is overwhelming research that an employee’s chosen workplace might not affect their output, and will likely even boost their productivity.

Picture this: It’s a work-from-home day. The sun is shining, the beach is calling, and the pub has an outlet you can plug your laptop into. What harm can be done by taking your afternoon meetings from the local beer garden?

A lot, employment experts say, warning that work-from-home doesn’t necessarily mean the entire world is your office.

“Working from home doesn’t automatically mean working from anywhere,” Dr Giuseppe Carabetta, Associate Professor of Workplace and Business Law at the UTS Business School, tells The Money Edition.

“An employer could generally give a lawful and reasonable direction about where work may be performed, particularly if the location creates genuine concerns about safety, privacy, confidentiality, IT security or the employee’s ability to perform their work.”

It’s a sentiment that Athena Koelmeyer, Managing Director and Principal at Workplace Law, shares.

“Most employers will have a work from home policy or similar in place that requires employees to self-assess their home workspace for ergonomics, privacy, internet stability – this means for most employees that they will be required to work ‘from home’ or the place approved by the employer consistent with the policy,” Koelmeyer tells The Money Edition.

“The reason this kind of self-assessment is required is that employers are at risk for a worker’s safety while they are ‘at work.’

“Employers will want to be confident that the employee is working in a safe, secure environment and that the work they are doing is also secure and kept confidential.”

Does that mean the local pub or even the beach is out?

Subscribe here for our FREE Tuesday and Thursday newsletter

Email address

Subscribe

Yes, says Koelmeyer, but the rules aren’t clear-cut.

“Absolutely. Working from a beach or the pub is a terrible idea. Not only could there be absolutely no guarantee of security or confidentiality in relation to the work the employee is performing,” she says.

“An additional issue would be what ‘work’ an employee is actually doing – I doubt very much that work from a beach or a pub is productive or that the employee will be producing good quality work in that environment.”

Dr Carabetta said an employer would be within their rights to tell an employee not to work from their local park, particularly if they were concerned that confidentiality could be breached.

“The beach is a good example — it might sound attractive, but an employer could reasonably ask whether confidential conversations can be overheard, whether a laptop screen is visible to others, whether equipment is secure and whether the location is actually suitable for performing the job,” he explains.

“A pub presents similar issues.

“There is also an obvious distinction between working from a quiet café for an hour and spending the afternoon drinking while supposedly working.

“Employees remain obliged to perform their work properly during working hours wherever their laptop happens to be.”

Much of the legality of remote work boils down to the employee’s ability to protect the employer’s interests and maintain its policies.

But what about an employee’s productivity?

According to Dr Libby Sander, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Bond University, an employee who works where they want to often will work better — as long as their employer trusts them to be there.

“If we look at the four-day work week as an example, which isn’t necessarily location specific, we find that productivity remains the same or actually gets better,” Sander told The Money Edition.

“And for hybrid work, when you’re in the office some of the time and most of the time, again, productivity is the same or gets better.

“There have been studies on remote work as well where people are fully out of the office pretty much all of the time – and there were significant improvements in productivity there as well.”

As Dr Sander explains, a busy cafe or park might actually be more productive than a busy office because ambient noise helps workers focus.

“Sometimes people say they can concentrate much better in a cafe, even though it’s noisy, than I can in the office, and there’s actually a really good reason for that,” Dr Sander says.

“In the office, your brain can’t tune out. It’s constantly looking for that conversation that might be about me, or it might be something I need to know.

“If you’re in a cafe or a library space working, it’s unlikely to be about you.

“That low-level ambient noise and kind of interesting environment is actually really good for some people to focus. Some research has shown it is great for creativity because that stimulus, our brains like visual complexity, and it likes different input.”

The hardest issue isn’t productivity, but overturning decades of ingrained office culture.

“This is one of the big barriers where we still see these return-to-office headlines about mandates of being in four or five days a week,” Dr Sander says.

“There was a study that was done last year in the US that showed that companies that had this mandated five-day week return to the office didn’t have any increase in profit or shareholder return.

“It is a false assumption.”

She says the research shows an employee’s output has more to do with their character than their physical location.

“As I’m sure many readers would appreciate, just being in the office has no correlation with being productive either,” Sander says.

“There’s plenty of people in the office who are walking around, talking all day, having coffee, whatever they’re doing on their computer, not being that productive.

“There’s just so much research now that has overwhelmingly disproved that.”