The Office for National Statistics has published its latest report “Homeworking hours, rewards and opportunities in the UK” showing that of the employed population, 35.9% did some work at home in 2020, an increase of 9.4 percentage points compared with 2019. Employees who mainly worked from home were less than half as likely to be promoted than all other employees and to earn a bonus.
This highlights the inequality that can arise between those who work from home and those who don’t and poses challenges for employers to ensure that home workers aren’t discriminated against especially those with protected characteristics or those who may find it more difficult to return to office working such as people with disabilities and parents with young children.
If they become less likely to be promoted as a result, this could lead to a lack of diversity at leadership level and also claims of discrimination. Businesses must ensure employees are assessed according to the quality of their work, and not where that work is done.
Closely monitoring earnings, bonuses, promotions and training opportunities to ensure everyone is being treated equally is an important start. The hurdles to promotion faced by home workers are the same barriers responsible for gender pay gaps and discriminatory redundancies.
Employers need to be careful that home working doesn’t lead to a kind of unconscious bias where a lack of visibility results in those workers being inadvertently discriminated against.
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