A recent landmark legal case in which a Telstra employee successfully claimed compensation for injuries suffered while working from home has raised some serious concerns for employers who offer similar flexible working arrangements.

The Telstra worker claimed she slipped down stairs twice in two months while working on marketing campaigns from her Brisbane townhouse. Telstra denied liability because the falls occurred outside the worker's designated workstation.

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal however, found the shoulder injuries she suffered were work-related and made the multi-million dollar ruling, whereby Telstra was liable to pay legal and medical costs as well as compensation for lost income.

This case illustrates the necessity of agreements between employers and their employees who are working from home, in order to ensure a safe working environment. And it's something that my organisation has recently developed for our clients as well as putting a 'Home-Based Work Agreement' in place for our own home-based workers.

Being in the safety training industry we had already identified this area as a potential issue and while litigation was not our key motivator it was certainly a factor.

In our experience, by allowing employees to work from home we are encouraging a better life balance, which leads to improvements in health and well-being and increased staff motivation with reduced stress. But by offering more flexibility we also realised that we have a duty of care to provide a safe and secure environment for our employees working from their home.

We tackled this issue by putting a 'Home-Based Work Agreement' in place which is in line with our company's core values of safety and security. For us, we see safety as not only important but essential whilst working from a home-based environment.

We considered creating new sets of policies and procedures or modifying existing company OHS, IT and intellectual property policies and procedures. But decided these were being too directive and intrusive.

For our organisation the 'Home-Based Work Agreement' provides a significant improvement on what was previously implemented relating to health, safety and wellbeing for workers working from home. We now have a clear understanding of expectations and required outcomes for the worker and company.

We continue to have employees working from home on a part time basis, which I think illustrates our company's commitment to providing work flexibility and creating work-life balance choices for our employees.

So, after implementing our own 'Home-Based Work Agreement' we decided that a similar agreement be drafted for consultation with company directors as a new safety initiative.

Here are the steps an organisation needs to take in putting together a 'Home-Based Work Agreement':

  • The first step an organisation needs to take in putting this type of agreement in place is initial consultation. Discussions need to take place between workers who currently work between the workplace and home and the company's OHS Representative to seek and consider views towards implementing a 'Home-Based Work Agreement'.
  • The second step is to actually design the 'Home-Based Work Agreement' which also takes into account future employees working from home as their primary place of work.
  • An agreement needs to integrate company and workers' obligations, concerning areas of safety, equipment usage, network security and the protection of intellectual property.
  • Ultimately the ideal 'Home-Based Work Agreement' needs to be flexible so should be a document template that fulfils all the requirements of a 'Home-Based Work Agreement' combined with a thorough and comprehensive risk management checklist. It serves to define the nature of the safety and security objectives.

As an organisation we believe that a safety culture exists when its people are focused on personal responsibility, willing participation, shared identity and a commitment to continuous safety improvement. This new agreement compliments the company's current safety practices not only within the workplace but also within the home.