Have your policies caught up with the new normal?

As an employer, there are a number of critical areas to address from a policy and procedure perspective when you have people working from home. These areas include:

• Occupational health and safety
• Information security
• Expense reimbursement and tax treatment

Whether people are working remotely on permanent, temporary, or intermittent basis, it is absolutely critical to set them up correctly. We provide a folio of resources to address the risks and requirements of deploying people to remote or home-based working arrangements.

Occupational health and safety legislation continues to be in force when employees work from home. Specifically, employers are required to ensure employees:

• Set up a designated workspace in their home
• Perform a hazard assessment of the home or remote workspace
• Mitigate the risks of working alone 
• Report any incidents and injuries that occur while working remotely

The risk of confidential information falling into the wrong hands has increases exponentially when employees work from home. Employers must take appropriate steps to ensure confidential information is protected from loss, accidental disclosure, and unauthorized access. The POLICY PROTEC Working from Home Folio provides employers should identify and clearly articulate the extra precautions needed for people work from home.

Employers are wise to communicate to employees the home office expenses they will and won't reimburse to employees who are working from home.  For those expenses that are not reimbursed, employers may with to consider issuing T2200 forms, to allow employees to deduct expenses from their employment income.

Whether expenses are deductible or not depends on a number of factors. To avoid issues with the CRA it is critical that employers deploy a valid, organization-specific working from home expense reimbursement policy.

POLICY PROTEC has developed a folio of resources to help employees be safe and productive, and protect confidential information, while working from home.  These resources include:

• Remote working policy
• Home workspace hazard assessment checklist and form
• Working alone policy and check-in procedure
• Remote access to information policy
• Working from Home Expense Reimbursement Policy
• Working from home agreement template
• Employer's checklist
• and more

These resources are configured specifically for your organization and ready for use in as little as one week.