I'm just an average man with an average life
I work from nine to five, hey, hell, I pay the price
All I want is to be left alone in my average home
But why do I always feel like I'm in The Twilight Zone?
Somebody’s Watching Me, by Rockwell
Since the Coronavirus Pandemic, more and more people have been working from home offices, either in fully remote, hybrid, or flexible schedules. In 2023, approximately 37% of workers employed in Australia were still working from home regularly (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2023), where those arrangements were flexible or regular, and could include weekend work. People work from home more flexibly or to choose their own hours, if they operate businesses from their own home, to catch up on work, and to save time travelling (ABS, 2024). 60% of managers and professionals worked from home, and people who worked from home were also found to work overtime 43% of the time. It's worth noting that these numbers are just post-pandemic.
Prior to COVID, in an Australian context the percentage of employed people working from home regularly had been steadily increasing by around a percentage point every two years, before increasing by around eight percentage points between August 2019 and August 2021, from around 32 to 40 per cent, and workers who worked from home typically worked with more effort, experienced increased intrinsic motivation, and that this has been found to be positively correlated with working from home frequency from before the Pandemic (Rupietta & Beckmann, 2018). Working from home has been a regular part of the Australian occupational landscape for a long time, even if discussions around rights, responsibilities, and regulations relating to working from home have only been increasingly discussed after COVID.
To work from home is to be able to perform work tasks away from a centralised office. The ability for people to do their job from home is strongly tied to their occupation and the tasks they are required to perform, being particularly suited to office-based workers who use computers, interact less with the public, do not perform outdoor work or physical activity, and do not work with immovable structures, materials or equipment (Australian Government, 2021). A worker's suitability to work from home depends on considering the resonableness and practicability of doing that work from home, and that depends on the workplace, its facilities, and its ability to dislocate work from an office (New South Wales Government (NSWGov), 2023). The work that will be done from home will therefore usually be done using information and communication technology (ICT) (Haddon, 2004). ICT resources include physical resources like computer screens, tablets, keyboards, and printers, infrastructure like internet and ethernet, wifi, and phone lines, consumables like paper, toner, and pens, and require space to use.
The arrangement of physical ICT resources in a home workspace poses challenges for employers and employees. Workers' homes typically do not have dedicated areas for work-related ICT setup, and workers typically expect or desire support from their employers to facilitate working from home (CFOTech, 2023). The use of non-ergonomic chairs and desks when working from home have been associated with increased incidence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders and time off work (Cruz-Ausejo et. al., 2022). The challenge then is to meet the requirements of remote work through provided at-home ICT, within diverse workspaces, which are navigated by workers, all of whom have diverse bodies. Non-ergonomic solutions to working from home arise as ad-hoc measures to do work in nonstandardised environments. Laptops are portable and can be used on beds, coffee tables, and lounge chairs. Desktop monitors are portable and can be placed on shelves, kitchen tables, benches, and areas that are not desks. The incidence of musculoskeletal injuries in home office contexts increases where the effect of stereotypically sedentary postures is magnified by working in workspaces at home with domestic resources and without external assistance, or basic requirements (Xiao et. al., 2021).
So what is there to do?
Employers of people working from home are obliged to eliminate or minimise health and safety risks at work, so far as is reasonably practicable, including when workers are working from home (Safe Work Australia (SWA), n.d.a). Safety risks at work include poor workstation setup, which can include poor physical ergonomics, poor lighting, inappropriate heat control, inappropriate room closure, poor heating, cooling, or ventilation, and poor electrical safety. Task-related hazards include fatigue risk for tasks that take long hours, tasks that are worked in overtime, lack of clarity about communication, role constitution, lack of support, or inappropriate job demands. Contextual risks include work remoteness, the physical setup of the home, the impact of the outside environment like neighbours and roads, as well as psychological factors that may affect the worker (SWA, 2023a; Birimoglu Okuyan & Begen, 2022). While resources like workstation setup diagrams are available, as shown in Figure 1 below, these guidances isolate the workstation with respect to its environment and present an idealised precis of workstation ergonomics.
Figure 1
Proposed Workstation Considerations
Note. Reproduced from Safe Work Australia, 2023b, Setting Up Your Workstation Infographic.
In practice, this isn't always practical or practicable to do. Desks are large, unwieldy, require assembly and space to use, and impose space requirements in terms of ingress and egress, sitting, and their effect on movement through workspaces and homes. Laptops are used as an intermediary, where they can be put on a riser to bring the screen up to eye level, but doing so raises the height of the keypad, increasing strain on workers' wrists (Okyuan & Begen, 2022). This can be mitigated by using a USB keyboard which is wider and can be arranged independently of the laptop. The dependence on laptop touch trackpads can also be mitigated with USB-wired or wireless computer mice. Additionally, the diagram in Figure 1 uses a chair with no arms, leaving the elbows unsupported. This is important as different forearm support has been found to change muscle activation patterns in desk work (Delisle et. al., 2006), and forearm support intervention is associated with reduced incidence of shoulder-neck pain and hand-arm pain (Rempel et. al., 2006; Wærsted, Hanvold, & Veiersted, 2010). This is of course before we consider that people are different, their environments are different, and their different physical tolerances to different working arrangements are different as well.
Workers working from home experience increased risk of isolation as a consequence of their distance from their team (Galanti et. al., 2021). Communication is effective in mitigating the experience of loneliness and isolation in remote workers (Van Zoonen & Sivunen, 2022). Strategies for supportive communication to mitigate felings of lineliness and the impact of mental healths tressors include maintaining regular verbal communication, ensureing clear instructions regarding workloads, expectations, and job roles, encouraging employees to adhere to start and finish time and to take breaks to minimise the effect of work boundary spillover into family time (Chen, Powell & Greenhaus, 2009), and to develop a proactive organisational culture toward mental health safety (Safe Work South Australia (SWSA), n.d.). This also means that businesses and HR departments offering work from home arrangements as regular or flexible alternatives need to have proactive HR and OHS policies in place to assess, address, and action the risks of working from home (Business Victoria, n.d.). Ideally, the effect of these policies would empower the home worker to take charge of their own safety, to maintain a safe work environment, keep their equipment safe, attend to their own at-home safety as is reasonable, and protect their own health (Worksafe Queensland, 2020). The challenge here is that during the COVID pandemic, the rapid transition to working from home arrangements was ad-hoc, and in its maturity, training is needed to help business negotiate these challenges, such as formal policy concerning remote management, effective communication, performance review, and practical training about use of software (Oakman et. al., 2022).
Considering safety when working from home also requires considering the safety of the working environment, being the workers’ home. The implications for Occupational Health and Safety liability and whose responsibility it is to mitigate risk for home workers is an evolving field of law and so will be addressed separately to the practical and organisational ergonomics of working from home. However, housing design and quality has an impact on workers’ wellbeing (Alonso & Jacoby, 2023), both from the perspective of lived cities and from the ability of workers to have increased control over the aesthetic and spatial parameters of the workspace, which influences feelings of satisfaction, safety, and comfort (Barton & Le, 2023). The safety of the home working environment has physical elements such as lighting, slip risk, and ergonomic risks, as well as psychosocial risks not found in the contemporary office such as the increased risk of working overtime, which itself causes disruption to family life (Ojala, Nätti & Anttila, 2014). Bringing the work into the home environment means physically locating work related tasks close to home related tasks, which include personal self care, family care, social life, and recreation. Care should be taken to draw clear boundaries between work related tasks and a worker’s actual life so as to minimise spillover of work-related stress to at-home living.
Lastly, and most importantly, effective remote working requires individualised support for the remote worker. When considering the person, each worker is different, so the challenge is to change the environment to facilitate the person's engagement with the task, and where this is not possible, provide support to the worker to best facilitate their workability, thereby controlling risk from inappropriate job demands as per the Hierarchy of Controls (SWA, n.d.b). As per that model, the mitigation of risks in a home working context is undertaken through intervention at the administrative and PPE levels, where the provision of equipment to workers to minimise risk and the use of training to increase worker role clarity and control are PPE and administrative, respectively. Engineering controls in a home working context are more tricky as environmental adjustments are undertaken at the behest of the worker, which may or may not be practicable given that even if a worker is working from home, there is no guarantee that they own that home. The Australian Bureau of statistics found that in 2022, 66% of Australians owned their own home while 31% rented (ABS, 2022). There are no available figures at time of writing investigating the proportion of workers who work from home and either rent or own. Individual factors like occupancy, travel time, the availability, consistency, and quality of infrastructural resources like electricity, internet, technological capability, and the environment have the potential to impact work from home sustainability.
The conclusion that can be drawn from this superficial review of available statistics and the reviewed literature is that working from home requires a re-examination of some fundamental assumptions regarding office-work as well as the adjustment of assumptions regarding Human Resources and Occupational Health and Safety policy. Technology has made it possible to do work away from the workspace, which is a revolution in labour comparable to that of the development of the steam engine. However, the removal of work from the workplace has legal, occupational, personal, organisational, and societal implications, and the quality of response to those challenges will determine the quality of occupational life for those workers who elect to engage with and continue in home, hybrid, and remote working arrangements which, given the uptake and perpetuity of these arrangements, may well continue into the future.
None of this information constitutes medical, legal, occupational health and safety, best guidance, standard, or other guidance, instruction, or prescription.
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References:
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