Workers’ compensation claims a threat to employers post-Covid

Survey reveals 45 per cent of employees working from home suffering from health issues.

Dr Ben Hamer.

Australian companies could face hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts to employees who have been injured from years of working from home under unsafe conditions.

This is the view of Dr Ben Hamer, a leading consultant on the future of work, who warns that 2023 is shaping as the year of the workers’ compensation claim after a survey revealed 45 per cent of respondents were suffering from a health issue – such as sore neck and shoulders – from remote work.

“It’s almost like the risk that has been hiding in the shadows waiting to rear its head,” he says, urging companies to stick to the rules and ensure home workstations were safe.

The figures come from the 2023 Flexiworks Snapshot survey conducted by Officeworks, which sells home office products.

Hamer, who helped develop the survey, says while the ability to enforce OH and S rules varies between states, federal legislation makes clear that a person working from home is legally regarded as working from the office and employers have a duty to ensure their safety.

“Organisations invest so much money in their physical office footprint,” he says. “They understand the need to entice people to come into the office, so they want really nice, almost luxury offices, (but they) are investing very little in their teams’ work-from-home set-up.

“If employees are spending at least half of their working week at home, why is it that there’s such a disproportionate focus on the investment we place in the office versus the investment we place in our work from home setups?

“Some people are still working from a kitchen table or they’re working from a monitor that’s stacked on top of an old copy of the yellow pages.”

Hamer says the figure of 45 per cent of Australian people working from home who report a health related issue “is absolutely huge”. Only 37 per cent say their workstation has been ergonomically assessed by their employer.

“So this is a massive red flag to say you need to assess the economic set-up of your employees,” he says.

Hamer says that during Covid lockdowns, OH and S regulators were lenient because it was difficult for organisations to check setups given the speed needed to shift staffers to remote work.

“They had to do it overnight, they never had full (OH and S) policies in place, and with Covid restrictions you couldn’t necessarily formally assess a workstation,” he says. “But under the legislation, your work-from-home set-up is considered a workplace ... and as this (becomes) the new way of working, the regulator is going to start coming down harder on organisations. Working from home is something (companies) absolutely need to get on top of.”

The survey shows more than 70 per cent of people would not take a job in a company that does not have a flexible work policy, indicating that flexibility has gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have.

Hamer says that in part, this is because with companies not giving pay rises, flexible work is one issue on which employees can insist. Hamer says he’s surprised one third of organisations don’t have a formal working from home policy, given companies have been working remotely for more than three years.

“We call them flexi fence sitters. It’s almost implying they’re waiting for some kind of permission to be able to go back to the way things were. That does surprise me, particularly when you have 92 per cent of people saying they believe organisations should have a formal flexible working policy.

“I think we’ve proven hybrid work and flexible work is here to stay. ... flexibility is showing across multiple studies in multiple forms (as adding to) productivity and employee empowerment and satisfaction. I think there are some leaders who are still sitting there waiting to go back to the way things were, but I think that number is getting smaller and smaller.”

Hamer says some companies resist a formal flexible work policy because they fear it might contradict some parts of their business which need different arrangements.

“It sounds corny, but I’d encourage them to have flexibility in their flexible working practices,” he says. “You still have a policy, but you have flexibility within that. It could be whatever works for you, your customers and your team (but) there are still some kinds of guardrails. What people are looking for is organisations not to sit there quietly and then to come out and mandate something, because we know mandating office attendance has a massive impact on turnover and satisfaction.”

He says some smaller businesses are reluctant because they thrive on organisational agility, and having the ability to be much more dynamic to respond to what’s going on and pivot the organisation’s focus if they need to.

The survey covers 1000 people in jobs that can be done from home for businesses with more than 10 people. It shows 44 per cent of people have been directed to go back to the office on at least some days, and Hamer says some companies are “really bolshie” about getting people back to work.

“I absolutely disagree with that perspective,” he says. “What we found from doing some analysis of US Bureau of Labour statistics is that productivity actually declined when people started coming back into the office, because the role of the office has fundamentally changed.

“When people come into the office, they’re not opening up their laptops, they’re having coffees, they’re socialising. They’re building relationships and rapport, they’re connecting. And so it’s actually proven that home is better for true productivity in the sense of output over time. Home is better for deep thinking, concentration, report writing, emails, etc. The office is better for building psychological safety, innovation, creativity.

“The question I keep coming back to is why, why are we mandating people coming in? Is it because we’ve invested in these offices and we’ve got leases that we’re locked into? At the end of the day it should be about people being empowered to do their best work. Don’t expect people to come into the office and just plough through work. The role of the office has moved from offering a place that people come into nine-to-five, five days a week to be ‘how do we go and create psychological safety and drive innovation and connection?’”

The office still has a really important role to play, according to Hamer, but its role has changed.

“In order for you to be able to work from home, to be productive, you still need to come in. Make sure you have that strength of relationship, build your work through those connection activities, do that face-to-face collaboration,” he says.

Hamer believes we are seeing for the first time how productive working from home can be: “I think there was a level of scepticism. If I think back to this time last year when people were saying, ‘yes, but that’s a Covid thing, and soon as lockdown measures are fully lifted, we’ll start to see people flooding back’.”

This has not happened, but Hamer admits surprise that 20 per cent of workers are now back in their offices five days a week, compared with about 4 per cent a year ago.

“That shows there are people who were just craving to go back to the way things were in terms of their own personal routine,” he says. “But I don’t think that figure will get much higher in the next two or three years.”

The survey also found that among those who have looked for a job in the past two years, 46 per cent declined an offer with unsatisfactory flexible work conditions, Among those working from home, salary was still their top job criteria, followed by work-life balance, then flexible work arrangements.

“The impact of this will be felt in 2023, as more than half of respondents have looked for jobs in the past two years,” the report says.