Domestic violence is a gendered problem which affects one-in-three women and has devastating impacts on women’s careers and employment. It is also a complex work health and safety problem. But what responsibility do employers have for domestic violence when working from home?
Domestic violence: a work health and safety problem
Domestic violence is often overlooked as a work health and safety problem despite clear risks to workers and colleagues. The question of employer responsibility is important given the mainstreaming of working from home since the COVID-19 pandemic. Over one-third of Australians now regularly work-from-home which has blurred the spaces of ‘work’ and ‘home’.
Under work health and safety laws, employers have a duty of care to their workers when the ‘workplace’ extends into work-related spaces, including conferences, fly-in/fly-out accommodation and home offices.
According to Safe Work Australia, “family and domestic violence can become a WHS issue if the perpetrator makes threats, intimidates or carries out violence on a partner or family member at the workplace, including if working from home.”
Employer responsibility extends beyond the office
Our understanding of what defines the ‘workplace’ has changed significantly over time. Once considered a physically and legally distinct sphere of paid labour, the contemporary workplace is more flexible. Workers are now far more connected to ‘work’ through digital technologies and mobile devices. The fluidity of these boundaries is complex in relation to domestic violence and directly shapes employers’ duty of care.
In new research published in Work, Employment and Society, we sought to understand how workplaces managed the risk of domestic violence when working from home during COVID-19 lockdowns.
We studied the rise of the ‘shadow pandemic’ of domestic violence in New Zealand, the country with the highest rate of domestic violence in the OECD, to understand how employers managed domestic violence risk in the home. While our data focused on the experience of workplaces in New Zealand that had suffered through extended lockdowns, we also found important insights for the Australian context.
Employers are struggling to fulfill their duty of care
The study found employers faced several difficulties in fulfilling their duty of care responsibilities:
- While the pandemic increased awareness of domestic violence as a work health and safety concern when working-from-home, there were significant barriers to identifying DV risk.
- Employers only gained awareness of domestic violence if it was ‘visibilised’ through stereotypical physical cues (such as wearing a hoodie inside on a warm day), behavioural patterns (such as having a camera switched ‘off’ in Zoom calls), or from direct disclosure by a victim.
- Training managers to ‘spot the common signs’ of domestic violence was ineffective and unhelpful, particularly with coercive control.
- Duty of care under WHS laws hinges on employers having ‘reasonable awareness’ of the risk of domestic violence. But stigma and fear mean that workers rarely disclose violence to employers. ‘Warning signs’ can be difficult to spot, go unnoticed, or be ignored by colleagues and managers.
Ensuring safety when home is the workplace
Despite the challenge of managing DV risk when home is the workplace, employers can take several proactive steps to ensure the safety of women working from home and better protect victims of violence.
- Review your organisation’s domestic violence policies. Policies should clearly outline expected behaviours at work (including when home is the workplace) and consequences for misconduct such as abuse of company time, resources or technologies.
- Train and educate line managers and staff. Workforces need to deepen their knowledge of risks when working from home. This might mean partnering with specialist DV organisations to better understand the risks of domestic violence and appropriate responses.
- Assess domestic violence risk in the home. Line managers should regularly check-in with workers to assess risk when working from home.
- Strengthen organisational culture. Foster an organisational culture that promotes trust, safety and inclusion.