This article by Angie Creery, Associate in the employment team at Lewis Silkin LLP, explores whether the big homeworking experiment of the past year has brought specific challenges for older workers and asks what a future of homeworking may mean for them.

Introduction

For some workers (this author included), March 2021 will see their one-year anniversary of continuous working from home, whether through cautious choice, home-schooling necessity or temporary or permanent office closures.

Reports of employers relinquishing office leaseholds and allowing workers to work from home “forever” have led many to speculate whether homeworking really will be the new, permanent, normal for the majority of office-based workers – even if for only part of each working week. While some have welcomed this idea, others have shunned it, pointing to the challenges many have faced during lockdown-imposed working from home.

Technological ineptitude – myth or reality?

Back in March 2020, fears circulated about older workers’ capacity to adapt to the technology needed to work from home effectively, ranging from VPNs to video-conferencing software. A Milkround study  last May found that over two-thirds of UK employees thought younger staff members were in a better position to adapt to the lockdown where digital communication was vital. Meanwhile, a Resolution Foundation study found that workers aged 55 and over were the group least likely to be able to work from home and did not expect this to change in the future. Speculative reasons for this included being more settled in the routine of going out to work, a dislike of relying on technology and/or being more likely to work in senior occupations that rely on social interaction.  

But were these fears grounded in reality? In the US, a Center for Retirement Research study found that close to half of workers over 55 and above were in jobs that could be done at home. Alicia Munnell, director of the research centre, told the FT: “There is this idea that older workers are less able to work with computers or are less comfortable with them”, but the data showed that “in fact it wasn’t the case”. Others have expressed concerns that older workers are suffering less from technical ineptitude than being inaccurately portrayed as less tech-savvy than their younger counterparts. In a landscape of increasing unemployment, the risk is that employers may be selecting younger candidates over older ones, purely or partly on a misguided perception that the former are more likely to be technologically capable and so better placed to work from home.

Ergonomics of working from home

Technical capability aside, older workers may be more likely to need ergonomic solutions to enable them to work safely and effectively in the office and at home, as they typically experience physical decline with age. In the office, this may have translated into special keyboards and mice, ergonomic chairs or standing desks, most of which were not in place for homeworking when the pandemic began. The successive lockdowns have created health and safety problems for employers in ensuring their employees are working safely, with many taking advantage of the government’s limited tax exemption to provide tax-free equipment to enable employees to work from home during the pandemic.

The risks of workers not having the right homeworking equipment were highlighted by a recent Herman Miller survey of US office workers, with 90% reporting experiencing pain or ailments such as a stiff neck (39%) and back pain (53%) since the beginning of the pandemic. This is a worrying statistic for all age groups but particularly concerning for older workers, who are more likely to sustain injuries that are more severe and take longer to heal.  

Employers need to ensure that age-specific ergonomic evaluations are included as part of their working from home health and safety risk assessments, in order to minimise the risk of physical harm to all homeworking employees.

Working from home and mental health

Last year saw a rise in workers reporting all kinds of mental health difficulties while working from home. Oracle and WorkPlace Intelligence conducted a global study in which 70% of individuals reported that 2020 was the “most stressful year of their working lives”, especially for those working from home.

Interestingly, the study appeared to show that older age groups were less worried about their mental health at work compared to their younger counterparts. Of those surveyed, 80% of those in Generation Z (aged 22 to 25) and 73% of Millennials (aged 26 to 37) reported that they had more work-related stress and anxiety in 2020 than any previous year, compared with only 59% of Baby Boomers. A follow-up report supports this notion, highlighting that 66% of Gen Z and 59% of Millennial workers reported increased overworking due to the blurring of home and office, compared with only 31% of Baby Boomers.

Gallup’s March to November 2020 survey reached a similar conclusion. It found the expectation that work from home would primarily hurt older workers, who had “spent decades developing relationships, work habits, schedules and a sense of identity that hinges on their workspace”, to be simply not true. Gallup’s conclusion was that older workers benefited from the defence system of “financial and professional security, along with established community and social networks”, which boosted their wellbeing in the pandemic regardless of whether they were homeworking. This may also result from younger people being more likely to live in a cramped house or flat-share: an LSE survey of home-sharers (with an average age of 31) last summer showed that 42% were struggling to work with the lack of space in their home.

Positives of homeworking

In 2018, a Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy report found that 78% of workers aged 50 and over surveyed wanted employers to implement more flexible working, including working from home arrangements. Back in 2012, Age UK encouraged employers to put measures in place to assist individuals in homeworking as this was likely to have the widest reach in helping older individuals to stay in the workforce.

In many ways, the successive Covid-19 lockdowns have forced employers to make the previously “impossible” possible and facilitate the homeworking they may have ardently opposed in the past. Now it has been shown that it can be done, any employers planning a return to pre-pandemic days will need good evidence to explain why the degree of flexibility shown throughout the crisis cannot be continued by the business in the long term.

For older workers who can work from home and are adequately set up to do so, the arrangement can bring a host of benefits. Those with limiting health conditions can avoid the fatigue of commuting, while those with caring responsibilities can make use of the additional time to help them balance family commitments alongside work. Allowing individuals to work from home could be part of general shift towards flexible working that will potentially benefit many older workers and keep them in the workforce for longer. The key here is that giving workers the choice to work from home will undoubtedly assist many, but it does not mean all older workers will want or need it: the ability to choose is important. As the Centre for Ageing Better has noted, “being mandated to work from home is no more flexible than being mandated to work from an office”.

Jobs that can’t be done from home

Some of the studies highlighted above indicate that where older workers can work from home, they seem to be adjusting better to the new working from home normal than their younger counterparts. But what about those who cannot work from home? Data from the Office for National Statistics has shown that employees in higher-paying jobs have been more likely to be able to work from home during the pandemic, the flipside being that many lower-paid workers have either been furloughed on reduced pay or, in the worst-case scenario, made redundant since lockdowns began.

While the lowest-paid workers tend to be the youngest, a 2019 Resolution Foundation report estimated that 32% of workers over the age of 66 and 25% of those aged between 61 and 65 earned below the living wage. Older low-paid workers who are unable to work from home are in a significantly impaired position when compared with their younger low-paid counterparts. Studies have shown that older people are much less likely to switch jobs or move into better-paid occupations than their younger colleagues, while employers are also on the whole less likely to recruit older workers.

What employment law issues arise from older workers working from home?

Stepping back and looking at the overall picture, it appears that a future of increased homeworking may bring more benefits than drawbacks for older workers. This is provided they are able to work from home and their employer takes the appropriate steps to ensure they are healthy and safe, both physically and mentally, while doing so. There are nonetheless certain employment law issues that employers should consider for older workers in the context of a homeworking future, which include:

• Age-specific health and safety risk assessments. Employers already have a duty to carry out suitable and sufficient risk assessments for all employees, including those who are working from home. A sensible approach would be to ensure that age-specific assessments are included as part of this, in order to ensure that all employees have the appropriate ergonomic equipment for a safe and healthy working from home environment.

• Don’t assume that older workers can’t operate working from home tech. As highlighted above, this is an often inaccurate and discriminatory assumption to make. The correct approach is for employers not to assume that any of their employees have a good working knowledge of new technology and always offer appropriate training.

• Create a plan for dealing with flexible working requests. Cardiff University research showed that nine out of ten workers who worked from home during lockdown would like to continue to do so in some form, even after the pandemic is over. Many of these are likely to be older workers. Unless fully embracing hybrid working, employers will need to plan for which flexible working requests to accept and which to reject, without indirectly or directly discriminating against any group (including younger workers). Further advice can be found in this article on flexible working post Covid-19.