4 compliance sticking points when home office becomes the new normal

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The home office has given many employees and companies a taste for it – they want to anchor it firmly in their culture. Our guest author reveals what needs to be considered for this.

In many conversations with entrepreneurs, you can currently hear different attitudes on the subject of home office. There are many progressive doers among them who recognize the opportunities in what is probably the most profound and probably most lasting consequence of Corona in the world of work. What is striking, however, is that many have not yet thought through the topic consistently. Often, somewhat naive approaches and simplified conclusions prevail; This is expressed in sentences such as “We are mega-modern, everyone can do it as they want with us” or “Cool, our lease is about to expire and I’m currently looking for new office space – with home office I save half the space! “Or” Hey, what home office can do, remote work has been able to do for a long time: we can actually work from anywhere in the world “. Everything is correct in principle – but it’s not that simple after all.

As always in the adult world, the playground quickly becomes serious: Home office must be clearly regulated so that the rules of the game are clear for everyone involved. Specifically, that means: Every company that wants to be well positioned for the future needs a guideline that regulates all points about working from home. There are a few things to consider in detail.

If the home office is to be an official place of work, this must be regulated in the employment contract – or alternatively in a guideline. In practice this means: All occupational safety requirements must also be implemented in the home office. It starts with proper equipment – office chair, table, monitor – and ends with the light. Last year, in the hectic pandemic situation, people moved to the home office with laptops and worked there on the couch, at the kitchen table or on ironing boards. Now is the time to readjust.

The duty of care applies at the place of work: As soon as companies officially declare that home office is allowed, they must fulfill their duty of care and ensure that this new “home office” work location is appropriately equipped. Incidentally, the duty of care also includes the employer’s right of access to the home office. Yes, you read that correctly: Home office is an extension of the office space, there is no other way. However, this topic is only uncomfortable at first glance; transparent communication in the sense of a win-win situation helps here: The management is responsible for ensuring that the home workplace is optimally equipped. To do this, she needs access by arrangement (also virtually, for example via photo documentation or video call) in order to check that the place of work is what it should be.

Apart from the equipment, all compliance requirements that also apply in the office apply to the home office. This can, for example, concern topics such as environmental protection, information security or data protection – all operating rules that companies are obliged to adhere to: In data protection this can be a legal obligation, in information security it can be an obligation towards the client.

With regard to information security, this specifically means, for example, that under no circumstances may confidential documents be distributed in the common area of ​​a shared apartment; instead, ideally, you work in a separate study. The privacy protection should also be considered here: A room on the ground floor that allows a view from the outside through the window, or just the room door or the window in the back if you do not live alone, can be a rule violation. In addition, for confidential activities involving paper and printouts, there must be a lockable cabinet in the home office in which documents can be locked away, as well as a shredder, at least P4, better still P5 standard.

The right of access mentioned above is also relevant from a compliance point of view: employers may have to be granted access to any audits to ensure that all compliance standards can be maintained.

Another topic that many people have not yet thought through in the home office area is accident insurance. If the home office becomes an official place of work, then the insurance cover also extends to this area; the same conditions then apply to accidents in the workplace as in the office.

But even there, many are in the dark about the exceptions: If employees stumble in the office kitchen with coffee cups in hand and sprain their ankles, it is usually not an accident at work. The same applies in the home office, and here the gray areas are even greater if there are no demarcated areas: What if employees work in the kitchen? Here it is advisable to draw clear boundaries in the home office guideline and to regulate precisely these gray areas.

The home office has also arrived in the real estate market: With commercial properties, companies save space and relocate it to the home office of their employees. The private rental market reflects this: Employees need more space, every modern apartment has a study as well as a children’s room. Work and life are intertwined in many ways, and here too the rules of the game about how this is done for mutual benefit must be rewritten. One topic could soon become the subject of discussion: companies that save office space must contribute to the home office costs of their employees.

And who says that home office always has to be at home? Remote work is the new home office! If employees of a Hamburg company decide to work on the Baltic island of Fehmarn, why not rent a separate office there? But here, too, the following applies: In order for this to be fun, this model must also be regulated in a directive. And then the working day can also begin with a dip in the Baltic Sea.

It all sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. It is important to create the basic requirements and define the rules of the game: Then the companies can get started. This is the new way of working – when home office becomes the new normal.

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