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Introduction
Exogenous shocks such as wars, natural disasters and epidemics can demand the reorganisation of work on either a temporary or a longer-term basis. The recent and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated how both employers and employees have attempted to adapt to the associated economic and social crisis by using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to maintain, and indeed reinvent, their businesses (The Economist, 2020). With global government directives concerning safe distancing measures, employee hesitation to return to traditional office spaces (Churchill, 2020a; Howlett, 2020), ongoing regional lockdowns and the threat of multiple epidemic waves, the uncertainty for employers and employees has never been greater in the recent past (Forbes, 2020). While compliance with governmental mandates might have necessitated the initial shifts to tele-home-based working, several organisations and indeed their employees, have seemingly embraced these flexible practices with home-based work arrangements being affirmed as potentially indefinite (BBC, 2020; FT, 2020). For example, subsequent to the COVID-19 outbreak, as a first-mover to institute permanent homeworking in the UK, Slater and Gordon announced the closure of its London office from September 2020 (Tillay, 2020). Ongoing technological developments have meant that a variety of work roles are now being seen as efficiently carried out in the home environment.
The notion of teleworking is not novel; however, the potential benefits and complexities it presents deserves special attention in the face of exogenous shocks. The concerted restructuring of employment by means of altering one’s work location and adopting more widespread work-related ICTs from home is likely to change en masse individual work and life boundaries and indeed the employer-employee relationship. The disruption to standard working roles and practices within organisations that are necessitated by locational flexibility also have theoretically significant and emergent legal implications, such as instituting changes to the contract of employment and complying with data protection requirements around the storage and encryption of data. There might also be a variety of other provisions that the parties to the employment contract need to consider, such as insurance covering homeworking, ICT-related costs, the definition of a suitable workspace and health and safety issues.
Importantly, both employer and employee interests surrounding worker monitoring are likely to be heightened where tasks are carried out in remote locations (Chory et al., 2016;...