Remote work - Expert opinion

Working from home, was mainly available to areas: IT, business consulting, advisory and marketing businesses, that operated mostly on b2b contracts. 

The pandemic situation has forced nearly 8 million Poles to change the mode of work they have known so far. Considering that there are about 23 million working-age workers, this means that one in three Poles has experienced remote work. This includes those employed on a contract basis in SMEs, universities or governmental offices — places that were not prepared for this and did not work in such a model. Lack of training and technical support caused professional groups such as teachers and civil servants to have very bad memories of remote work. They had to spend more time and resources to implement the new reality. As it turned out, our legislation had a lot of space for free interpretation in terms of, for example, operating costs and higher energy consumption incurred by employees working remotely. There were many questions and doubts in the media, since companies no longer have to bear the high costs of offices, their maintenance and supplies, maybe they should share some of these "savings" with employees who had to work from home, using their own equipment.

And after all, employees were also left with more money in their pockets. By working from home, they saved on the cost of getting to work or eating out. A completely separate currency is time. An average 41-minute one-way commute, meaning they saved an hour and a half per day on their daily commute. It is good that these issues will finally be regulated in the code, curbing the arbitrariness of some companies that have shifted the burden of "remoteness" to employees. In the current amendment, there is a point about providing access to "necessary work tools," but also the cost of the training and technical assistance needed to perform remote work. The pandemic has brought to light the fact that where we do our work has an impact not only on "workspace" issues but has consequences in other areas such as RODO, data security and cybersecurity (because corporate networks are secured differently from home networks), legal and tax issues (in the context of the increasingly popular "workation") or even health and safety issues.

Coming to work in the office, everyone is given information on the ergonomics of the workstation. There is still no health and safety training on working from home, according to a survey conducted by marketing agency CraftJack. Almost a third admitted to working from their bed, which is definitely a bad and non-ergonomic place to do work. Few are aware that working in unsuitable conditions has an impact on occupational burnout, which is recognized as an occupational disease by the World Health Organization as of January 1, 2022.

There remains the question of control. How to control an employee who works in "their space"? How to carry out an inspection while respecting the intimacy of the employee's "home"? These and other questions, are yet to be answered in this amendment. Changes in the work model are happening faster than legislation, so it is good that after more than two years we will see an update and clarification of the framework for remote work that will not allow for discrepancies in interpretation.

Rafał Ferber is a remote work practitioner and consultant with nearly 20 years of experience. He has worked as a remote worker in the IT sector, run his own remote business employing more than a dozen people and authored the first online course on hybrid work in Poland.