Introduction

Just over a year ago, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced a “circuit breaker” which closed most work places except for essential services and key economic sectors such as food establishments, markets and supermarkets, clinics, hospitals, utilities, transport and key banking services. The default for most Singaporeans then was work from home, and we have reverted to this recently with the Phase-2 (Heightened Alert) lasting from 16 May 2021 to 13 June 2021.

In a survey reported in October 2020 which was commissioned by The Straits Times of nearly 1,800 people, it was found that eight out of 10 workers said they preferred to work from home or have flexible working arrangements. From an employee’s perspective, another survey conducted by The Straits Times in 2020 found that some of the top reasons why employees prefer flexible working arrangements include a reduction in the time spent commuting, more flexibility with their time and greater control over work-life balance.

Recently, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office Indranee Rajah, who oversees the National Population and Talent Division, suggested that even as (when, with the current developments) COVID-19 restrictions ease, companies should consider offering staff a hybrid work arrangement that will permit employees to spend time working in the office and some time working from home.

Suffice it to say, it seems that even when COVID-19 is behind us, there will remain a mix of office and home-based working.

What this means for businesses

While our European counterparts such as France, Netherlands, Poland and Austria, have some form of legislation governing aspects of working from home / remote working arrangements such as working conditions, and rights and responsibilities of employers and workers, there are currently no such regulatory provisions in Singapore.

At the baseline, employers in Singapore are subject to the Employment Act (EA) which sets out a minimum standard of terms and conditions that an employer must adhere to when hiring employees who are covered by the EA. However, the EA was not drafted in a time where flexible working arrangements were a norm (or perhaps even contemplated), and accordingly is not able to effectively apportion risk between employers and employees who are working under flexible arrangements.

Whilst seemingly far-fetched, one commentator provides an example as follows: “During office hours, an executive, seated at his desk at home, takes a work-related call on his mobile. He gets up and walks across the room to retrieve a document needed for the call, trips over his toddler’s toys and fractures his foot. It almost seems absurd to even suggest any liability on the part of the employer, but could it be argued that the executive was injured ‘on the job’?”

Minister of State for Manpower Zaqy Mohamad stated in Parliament in June 2020 that “Work-from-Home arrangements do not change an employer’s responsibility for work injury compensation. The key is to ascertain that the injury arose while doing work at home, and not while performing non-work activities at home”. This will be a “fact-finding exercise that is no different from all other WIC [Work Injury Compensation] claims”. Unlike traditional work from office, where employers have control over work environments, the hybrid work arrangement necessarily suggests that employers have no control over the working environment(s) of their employees. This calls into question the extent of employers’ liability should the employee be injured “at work”. And this is, but one legal complexity which arises from hybrid work / working from home.

Work-From-Home Policy

In order to help reduce (although not completely eliminate) the uncertainty on the part of both employers and employees, one suggestion would be to implement a Work-From-Home policy.

In line with the International Labour Organisation’s employer’s guide to working from home, the following matters could be addressed:

• Scope and application of policy (i.e. eligibility for the scheme)
• Compliance to existing company policies whilst working from home
• Compensation and work hours (i.e. the flexible arrangements in view of the arrangement)
• Safety and Health (e.g. ensuring employees are taking care of their own physical and mental health)
• Equipment, tools and supplies (where applicable)
• Technology, data protection and security (e.g. disallowing work computers to be connected to a public WiFi, use of VPN, handling of electronic and paper documents, etc.)
• Workstation at home (e.g. guidelines on home-office/work station setup, equipment installation, etc.)
• Communication (e.g. expectations on being contactable when working from home)
• Dependent care and other family responsibility (e.g. issues of child care and other personal obligations, taking of leave/time off etc.)
• Worker’s compensation and liability (e.g. subject to the EA, setting the parameters of existing safety and health policies to cover worker’s homes)
• Emergency illness (e.g. protocol in an emergency situation of illness and/or injury)

Conclusion

It remains to be seen how this COVID-19 pandemic will continue to unfold. However, employers and businesses would be best served to put some handles on what is already known as it relates to the welfare of their workers (in particular, working from home arrangements in order to provide them some certainty). In that way, companies will not only be able to continue business efficiently, but also continue to competitively attract and retain talent, notwithstanding the COVID-19 pandemic.