Homeworking checklist

Where you’ve agreed that an employee can work from home, there are various matters you should consider before the arrangement is finalised. Our checklist will ensure you have everything in place.

Setting up homeworking

Once you’ve agreed in principle to an employee’s request for homeworking, you then need to consider how it will operate in practice. Our Homeworking Policy can be used to set out your general rules on how your homeworking scheme operates and what rights and responsibilities both you and your employee have, but our Homeworking Checklist enables you to run through in detail what matters you need to consider and what specific actions you need to take for each individual employee. You can also keep it as a useful record of what’s been arranged or agreed.

Key considerations

Our checklist enables you to ensure that you’ve considered the following issues:

• work area, i.e. the employee has a suitable area or room at home to work
• domestic commitments, i.e. they’ve made appropriate arrangements to keep separate any domestic or caring commitments
• provision of equipment - you’ve agreed what IT and office equipment is to be provided to the employee (keep a written record of what has been provided)
• internet connection and IT support
• insurance - do check that the employee’s home insurance covers homeworking and that your business insurance covers any IT and office equipment you’ve provided
• risk assessment - you’re still under a duty to take reasonably practicable steps to ensure employees’ health, safety and welfare when they’re working at home, so you’ll need to carry out a risk assessment of their home-based workstation to identify hazards
• confidentiality, security and data protection, e.g. are computers properly password protected and inaccessible to others in the home? Are networks secure? How is information to be safely transferred between the office and the employee’s home?
• contact and control, including the arrangements for the employee to keep in contact with their line manager, how their performance will be managed, when they can be visited at home and when they might be required to attend the office
• expenses claim procedure, i.e. what expenses can be claimed and how
• termination, including the provisions for review of the arrangement and how and when it can be terminated by either party
• employment contract and policies, including any amendments required to the contract to reflect the homeworking arrangement and ensuring the employee has a copy of any relevant policies.