William Fry has been looking at the future of work for ireland in a new
article series, so we spoke to Darren Brennan to find out more
about what the future, the way ireland works, is going to look like
and how we can legislate for better health and safety, and remote working
practices for people who are working from home.
So, Darran, the Government recently closed a public consultation on guidance for
remote working. What do you expect to be addressed with updated guidance to come?
Given the immediacy with which Irish
workplaces and global workplaces entered into remote working over the
last few months, what became really evident was that
employers didn't have the time to react quickly and to amend their
policies and procedures. So what they did was they adapted,
like all employers do, they adapted. And now
that remote working seems like it's going to be here for the foreseeable future,
what we now have to look at are the
opportunities, the challenges and the future of how Ireland works.
Specifically, I suppose, what we want to see from the guidelines
are that they've learned from those opportunities and challenges, and the
examples of what's come before in the last few months.
And, you know, in particular what we expect to see in those guidelines
is advice for employers on cybersecurity, on health and safety, on tax issues,
on managing employees with disabilities while working remotely,
on managing data security issues, and so on and so forth.
And those are the sort of things that we'll be exploring
in our article series too.
That's great and I've read the first article in the series, the introduction, and one of the areas found
to be lacking in guidance is the right to disconnect,
it's what you mentioned. So do you think it's necessary for
employee rights such as the right to disconnect to be enshrined in law,
especially in an era of increased digitalisation and remote working?
So with the right to disconnect what we've seen is, in cases such as
O'Hare and Kepac, it really brought this into the public consciousness in Ireland.
So what the legislator should do now
is carefully consider the experiences from employers
particularly on productivity, and employees on the right to plug out,
and their experiences over the last few months. It should also carefully
consider other jurisdictions such as France who have already
implemented these sort of rights. But while the EU and Ireland are both
looking at these sort of rights now, employers and employees have taken the
initiative already. We've seen some public announcements from various
employers and companies of new rights to disconnect policies
that they've implemented, and also some anecdotal stories from
employees such as one particular employee
who decided to add an automatic reply with 'return to sender' after 6pm
So those sort of examples show to you that
the people are starting to react already but that guidelines
are important from the legislator and perhaps even arrive at some point.
That's really interesting. And this comes
from the idea of trying to not let work and home life bleed together too
much and that happens a lot when you've got a lot of remote working.
Do you think that's created a grey area for employers who are maybe unclear
on how their duty of care extends to the home office,
and and to what extent are they liable for their workers' wellbeing
while they're working from home?
Yeah, well this is really interesting and this is one of the areas where we've had many, many, many
queries from employers in recent months.
And it's something that those guidelines which we spoke about earlier
really must focus on and really, really must address.
So while physical health and safety with things like ergonomic assessments,
provision of equipment – those, you know, are understood
by most employers. And even where employers only had one or two employees
ever working from home, they understood those physical
assessments. What's new now for employees and employers
are wellbeing, performance management, team ethos – all those things
are new considerations now. And those are the sort of things that employees and
employers must work together on, and also must get some guidance from Government on.
That's great, Darran. Thanks so much for talking to us today.
Thank you so much as well. And thanks for this
opportunity to speak about this. It's so interesting
and it's something that's going to become more and more important
in the coming months