Congratulations ! Now you will have to consider the nitty-gritty of arrangements necessary for your new working style to develop smoothly. The union for skilled and professional workers MSF have introduced some guidelines for homeworkers to ensure their health and safety at work. They may be a counsel of perfection — particularly if you are only working at home on a very part-time or informal basis — but they are worth bearing in mind. They include :
- Homeworkers should be employees of an enterprise and not deemed self-employed. (It is vital that this is understood when you start homeworking, as you will lose out on a host of employment rights if you become self-employed.)
- To avoid isolation, contracts of employment should require homeworkers to attend the office periodically.
- There should be a separate room available at home for working, a separate telephone and payment for additional costs.
- There should be regular meetings between homeworkers. Electronic mail and telephone links with other homeworkers should be provided at the employer’s expense.
- There should be regular weekly liaison discussions between a tqa homeworker and his or her supervisor/manager .
- Homeworkers should enjoy the same rates of pay and employment benefits as office based workers, including childcare provision and family leave. They should be included in career development and appraisal schemes, including training programmes.
- All computer equipment should be provided, paid for and serviced by the employer, who will be responsible for installation and compliance with health and safety requirements. The employer should also accept legal responsibility for any accident or injury.
- Health and safety advisors and trade union advisers should be able to visit homeworkers.
- There should be a defined number of working hours.
- Homeworking should be voluntary with the right to return to the office.
These guidelines will, of course, be more honoured in the breach for the foreseeable future. But even if your boss has only agreed to let you work from home a couple of days (or more) a week on a trial basis, you will still need to establish some basic details : who provides what equipment and who pays for what. Who will pay for business phone calls (an itemized bill is essential). You will also have to make sure that you indicate your whereabouts on each working day, so the boss knows where to contact you. Having agreed these fundamentals, you will then need to be aware of the more general demands on you that working at home can make.
Communication skills are important for anyone who is self- employed, but those working as employees of a company at home also need a whole range of communication skills that are more sharply honed than their office colleagues. For one thing, they need to be able to communicate effectively over the phone with colleagues. Gesticulation, nods and shakes of head are only useful if your colleague can see you. It’s a good idea to phone your boss several times in the day — particularly at the end of it with a synopsis of what you have been doing. That’s so they know that you have been working. Once you are back at the office, talk about — and show — what you’ve been working on at home. Ask for feedback if no-one offers it.
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