Proper supervision and stress management remain critical for remote workers: lawyers

Article sourced from OHS Alert, 30/08/2023

Complying with a business's WHS duties includes ensuring workers working from home "are not forgotten" under the assumption they will "reach out if they need anything", a senior employment and safety lawyer has told a workplace mental wellbeing webinar.

Clayton Utz special counsel Laura Hillman told her firm's annual R U OK? webinar yesterday that various form of hybrid work have become the norm for many businesses, and this is a major change creating new mental health risks.

"What needs to be kept in mind is that where employees are authorised to work from home, home can become the workplace and duty of care and workplace health and safety obligations are still required to be complied with, including regarding mental health risks," she said.

"It remains important that supervision is still appropriate, and that employees are not forgotten on the assumption that they're working fine and they'll just reach out if they need anything.

"Providing proper supervision, including through video conferences and phone calls and not just emails, provides opportunity to identify if an employee needs more assistance or if something might be wrong."

Hillman said managers should engage with HR to obtain a "broader view" of a worker's online engagement, including when they're logging on and off and if there are patterns of sending emails at odd hours.

They should periodically assess whether remote arrangements are still working, particularly where circumstances change.

More broadly, employers must consider a number of psychosocial risks when assessing work-from-home requests.

This includes whether individual workers' roles are suited for remote work and if they can be supported and supervised appropriately to ensure workloads and work stress issues are managed.

"If someone is not performing to the level required by the employer and has been placed on a performance plan, a working-from-home arrangement may not be appropriate for that particular employee, as it'll be more challenging to be able to properly supervise the employee but also to provide support to actually give them a good opportunity to demonstrate improvement in their performance," Hillman said.

A good remote working policy can clarify an employer's expectations for employees who want to work remotely as well as what constitutes the workplace, the workers' work hours and when they are to start and finish work, she said.

Do your research on EAPs

In the same webinar, Clayton Utz partner Hilary Searing said organisations often see their health and safety and HR teams become "really disconnected", with implications for managing psychosocial hazards like sexual harassment.

"They're not necessarily talking to each other understanding what each other are doing, but I think this is a space where really, all of those teams need to be working together," she said.

"Psychosocial hazards, sexual harassment, managing injured employees – it creates an impact for the whole organisation and often needs a whole of organisation approach."

Searing went on to say that many people are surprised by how many resources employee assistance programs (EAPs) can now provide and employers should contact their providers to get a full understanding of what their package entails.

Hillman said EAPs are becoming more and more common as a support initiative offered to employees as part of a package for supporting wellbeing in the workplace.

But she noted that mental health initiatives like EAPs are not a substitute for proper risk management and employers need to ensure workers and managers are aware of what a service offers and that it is easy to access.

Hillman added that the need to ensure EAPs can be accessed appropriately was recently highlighted in Paul v State of New South Wales [2023] NSWDC 277, where a worker who believed he was utilising a specific EAP service, but was actually provided with an inferior one, was awarded $1.8 million in damages for a psychological injury (see related article)

It is important for employers to get feedback on whether an EAP is being used and what feedback has been provided by the users, she said.

"This can be done by asking for that information from the provider themselves, and doesn't involve identifying employees, but can be a good way to look at whether what you're offering is appropriate for your employees, or whether it should be modified or even expanded."