Aggressive Employers Worsen Mental Impact of Working From Home

Employers are being urged to recognise the inevitable stress and disruption of working from home and refrain from adopting a threatening approach towards productivity and work intensification demands.

The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work has released a briefing paper that reminds employers of their duty of care to ensure workers, including contractors and sole traders, have a safe work environment when performing their work at home – which includes an environment free from preventable mental health stressors.

Researchers Alison Pennington and Jim Stanford said that while some employers will adopt a constructive and realistic approach to home work during the pandemic, others will be as “aggressive as ever in attempting to maximise productivity and minimise labour costs.”

“Many will resist moving to home work arrangements even when they are technically feasible, for fear that ‘working from home’ becomes ‘slacking from home.’ Others will permit home work, but double down on work intensification demands,” the paper says.

“In a climate of mass unemployment and pervasive insecurity, home work could become a ‘baptism by fire:’ whereby workers are compelled to ‘prove themselves’ more energetically than ever to their employers, in hopes of protecting their jobs in the turbulent months ahead. Some employers will take advantage of this sense of insecurity to intensify work and tighten discipline.”

The researchers say that workers should be free from undue work intensification in these tough times and that a threatening approach to oversight will likely exacerbate the mental health and well-being challenges already posed by working in isolation.

“In this context, home work could become a new ‘digital panopticon’: whereby employers subject employees to surveillance and discipline from afar, and workers fear disclosing problems and challenges out of fear they’ll be seen as incapable of operating in the new environment.”

The paper also states that basic rights to standard and predictable working hours, and compensation for overtime, must continue to be observed.

Because more employees are working from home, and are effectively prohibited from leaving that ‘workplace’ during the COVID-19 shutdowns, some employers may implicitly assume that home workers are ‘always on the job.’”

“This colocation of work and life will further blur the already-fuzzy line between working hours, and the rest of peoples’ time.”

The paper also touches on various safety and ergonomic considerations for employers, as well as the temptation to shift some ongoing business costs to the employee.