If employees are to be asked to regularly work at home it is important that employers' liability insurers are made aware of this and employers need to remember to carry out specific home working risk assessments

Working patterns and remote working

Post lockdown many employers and employees perhaps reluctant to embrace remote working will have proved that the model works. Having established new working patterns both will have realised that working from home is as productive as it was whilst spending time in the office. This genie is now out of the bottle.

Whilst there has been a loss of close working relationships with colleagues, clients and customers may not have seen any difference in service levels. Certainly IT teams have seen their remote working processes severely tested and weaknesses will have been identified which will require correcting.

What employees have lost in comradeship they have gained in time saved in not having to commute to the office.

The lockdown restrictions will only be lifted slowly and carefully and not all employees will be asked to work in their places of work at the same time as social distancing measures are implemented across all business sectors.

All employers will be well advised to review their contracts of employment to allow for far more flexibility both in patterns and place of work.

The measure of employee performance is going to shift much more to objective measures output rather than managerial observation of day-to-day employee performance.

Soft skills so vital to helping create a team feeling and keeping organisations working smoothly will inevitably have to be re-engineered so as to work more effectively when holding web meetings via Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype etc. Thought will have to be given as to how and when to bring employees physically together to reform bonds of comradeship as well as how to ensure employee engagement through regular, timely and informative employee communications.

Employers should expect to receive and welcome more flexible working requests and the far sighted ones will invite these rather than waiting for the inevitable requests to flood in.

Contracts of employment will also be re-drafted to include those clauses many employment lawyers considered somewhat old fashioned and outmoded permitting employers to impose lay-offs or short-time working.