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Employers must adapt to new occupational health and safety (OHS) concerns born out of hybrid working arrangements, according to an Australian Catholic University (ACU) professor.
Hybrid work is here to stay. Despite new figures from the Property Council of Australia (PCA) highlighting that the portion of workers returning to the office rose in September, average office occupancy rates ranged from 41 per cent in Melbourne to 78 per cent in Adelaide.
Further supporting this is data published from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) highlighting that more than 20 per cent of Australia’s 12 million employed population worked from home on census day last year, with this rate rising to one in four people in Australia’s capital cities.
According to ACU senior lecturer and former prosecutor for the Queensland Office of Industrial Relations, Dr Trajce Cvetkovski, the OHS impacts of this shift will be felt throughout households, requiring conversations surrounding domestic violence and other psychological risks must become standard practice between employers and employees.
“Hybrid, flexible, disrupted, call it what you like, a workplace can be anywhere, anytime, and it’s anchored by law,” he explained.
“Work can be spread out in terms of time and location, but duties and obligations cannot be outsourced. That is, employers cannot walk away or hide from their duty of care.
“If they do, they could attract a workers’ compensation claim or worse, investigation or prosecution by the state regulator.”
While traditional workplace models meant that hazards are easily identifiable, modern, fluid arrangements have altered this, requiring increasingly personal conversations to be undertaken by employers and employees to mitigate potential risks.
Mr Cvetkovski outlined how a fatigued worker may be just as likely to face harm working remotely as in a bustling warehouse under management’s supervision. “But what about an employee exposed to isolation, alienation, disengagement, sustained abuse, or any other unacceptable conduct?” he asks.
“I am not sure an employer could ignore it just because it is out of mind, out of work site.
“Workers can operate subject to all sorts of trauma. So, whilst you as an employer may not have directly or materially contributed to that original condition per se, if the worker is still on the clock, then the working environment could be the subject of examination.”
He reminds employers that “the law requires you to protect workers to your best and reasonably practicable capacity”. Concluding that “once you allow someone to work remotely, there absolutely must be candour between both parties about what that workplace looks like”.
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