Working from home – is it ethical?

According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), 30% of adults had regularly worked from home in 2019 and Personnel Today reported that pre-Covid, 5% always worked from home.

Hi-speed internet infrastructure and cloud-based productivity tools have facilitated the growth in home working. The steady increase in home working was a fact of life and town planners, businesses and workers made their business and personal decisions in the full knowledge of this trend. However, the trend was for steady growth in home working, as recently as 2019 a Deloitte report “Leadership for the 21st Century”, found that only 50% of leaders considered that flexible working for senior managers would be important in the coming decade.

The pandemic has exponentially accelerated this change – An ICM/YouGov survey reports that the projection for homeworking has increased in a matter of months to 81% of respondents expecting to regularly work from home for a proportion of their time. This sudden upswing, if fulfilled, may devastate some local economies and business sectors that depend on office workers.

Working from home might not be good for people’s mental health, although the jury is still out. UCL’s Covid Social Study found that 69% of adults feel worried or very concerned about the impact of the pandemic in their lives. A proportion of this figure will be down to the lack of socialising and loneliness while working from home. The financial benefit to employers in avoiding the capital and revenue office costs will be significant. But in highly competitive sectors such as creative and technology industries, it may be too early to tell if innovation and ideas will be negatively affected.

There is a lot that is still unquantified as it is too early to predict what the “new normal” looks like and its personal and business outcomes.

However, what is known and generally accepted is that a business has a duty to a variety of stakeholders, including their staff, customers, society and the environment. In a mixed economy, such as the UK, “new capitalism” expects business to meet wider goals other than solely a fiscal return to shareholders. This includes a duty to the business community in which they are based, the many hundreds of thousands of local retailers and service providers.

There is a chasm between the middle class and working-class experience. The jobs that stand to be lost in town centres are poorly paid, such as cleaners, café and pub workers, people who work in entertainment venues such as cinemas and theatres and taxi services. According to a YouGov survey in May 2020, among workers in ABC1 (higher income) households, 53% say they are now working from home full time. This figure is just 22% in C2DE (lower income) households. Without heavy state subsidies, railway, tube, and bus services are likely to be scaled back, with the consequent impact on jobs and diminished accessibility for people who cannot afford a car or who do not want to contribute to climate change.

Long term, increased homeworking is likely to be the norm for a lot of people. Dormitory towns will eventually see local services such as cafes and restaurants catering for their home-working population – this is positive. But it will take time to change planning regulations, convert buildings, finance the acquisition of repurposed buildings and to relocate businesses. 

However, for such a seismic shift in the places where people work, in such a short space of time, there will be significant repercussions in the short to medium term.

Of course, employers have a duty to look after their employees and must not force them back to their offices whilst there is a significant level of coronavirus in the community.

There is no right or wrong answer, but businesses should take into consideration the impact on the local economy in which they operate before making long-term decisions that collectively will have far-reaching implications for society. After all, as Rishi Sunak proudly stated, when this is all over, society wants to remember that we funded a “..collective national effort and we all stood together”.

The ethics of monitoring home based employees

There is now a likelihood that a high proportion of UK employees will see working from home as the new normal. Previously, for many office-based employees, the occasional nudge, nudge, wink, wink “Working From Home” day was after a big football game, or a “duvet day” when the first snow hit suburban London – there was a real luxury to be able to wake up late, lounge around the house in your pyjamas and catch up on the latest TV box set. Now, this dream, or perhaps a more mundane version of it, has become a reality for most.

Up until this year, most employees still worked in an office. Employers’ assessment of staff performance has evolved over many years to reflect the office-based workplace. The assessment is a mix of formal and informal means, including appraisals, peer feedback, debrief sessions and analytics such as performance against targets. Importantly, informal feedback was gained by socialising with colleagues, after-work activities, and charity events. When staff fall foul of their objectives, they may be placed on performance management, with a high degree of supervision. If lateness is an issue, then the time of arrival at the office may be one measure. If additional support is required, then one to one mentoring could be the solution. Good and bad, this is the approach taken in many workplaces.

As an employee, working in an office, you are likely to accept a degree of supervision. This may include a record of your time entering and leaving the building, monitoring of the activity levels of each software application that you use and routine scanning of emails for key words. Your manager and colleagues will subconsciously and formally be assessing your performance, helpfulness, team spirit and general attitude. You accept all of this without thinking as the price you pay for a job. This is backed up by established custom, an employment contract and caselaw.  An employee working in the office knows that they are entering a workplace and adjust their behaviours, accordingly, becoming more professional. Likewise, after work drinks offer the opportunity to unwind and socialise with colleagues but still conscious of work etiquette.

As a higher proportion of staff may now be expected to work from home, the way in which the employer measures and monitors performance will have to adapt.

There are a range of home-working employee monitoring tools available and a lot more in the pipeline. As an employee, would you accept real-time keystroke monitoring, tracking of activity levels throughout the day, random screen snapshots and screen mirroring, email reading, facial recognition, and fingerprint biometric devices as well as location tracking?

Many employers had already moved from an input (time) based approach towards measuring of outputs  i.e. so long as the tasks you are set are completed to the accepted quality and on time, then it is left to you to manage your own time.

This advance in the thinking of employers has facilitated the move to flexible and home working. Despite this, the key issue is the blurring of home-life and work. Home is where we have a sanctuary, or at least the possibility of one. Home is where we may have our loved ones, our pets, hobbies, and all the distractions of life.

There are potentially issues of invasion of privacy when it comes to key stroke monitoring and random check-ins and screen monitoring. This is particularly relevant when the employee is using their own device to log into company systems.

There may be legal issues concerned with monitoring of emails depending on the legal jurisdiction and the circumstances.  

On the other hand, monitoring can ensure that home-workers are captured under a company-wide system that does not discriminate between office and home workers and potentially monitors all employee’s safety and mental health.

Employees should be given training (e.g. in time management) and the resources necessary to homework, or they could be seen to be unfairly discriminated against versus an office-based employee who has access to a plethora of tried and tested resources.

When it comes to promotion, an office-based worker who has a good real-life relationship with their office-based manager would probably have a better chance of promotion against an equally good candidate based entirely at home. To mitigate this risk, it would be desirable for all home-based workers to be afforded the opportunity to periodically socialise with colleagues and management.

Generally, employees have seen home working as a benefit, but is it ethical that an employer expects their staff to maintain a suitable office area within their own home. Perhaps the employer should contribute a financial sum for use of part of the home as an office? This would make it more justifiable for an employer to make demands of their staff at home. There may also be tax, health and safety and insurance implications of maintaining an office at home.

There is an ethical dimension for clients who are recharged time expended, so for all employees, they need to charge only the time where they are doing work on that client, so an effective time monitoring system is essential.

Effective security measures at home need to be in place, such as biometrics to ensure that sensitive data is only accessed by those authorised to do so.

All the measures above need explicit consent by the employee, and they need the assurance that this data will be handled correctly as per good practice company policies. It is likely that the policies will need to be updated. Home based staff will also need to know that monitoring is equitable and legal across all jurisdictions (if the business employs staff across the world) and proportionate depending on the type of role.