Very few businesses are confined within four walls anymore.

Many involved with the internet called it a Flat World Initiative – where people can communicate and collaborate from around the world without barriers in language or customs or travel.

[Image courtesy of Dylan from Flickr via a Creative Commons license] Telecommuting from a home office has gotten a bad rep in some business circles, but is the idea of allowing workers to work from home a concept that is being unfairly vilified by some executives? Some new research seems to make some suggestions.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Dylan via a Creative Commons license] Telecommuting, or at least working outside of an office, has expanded the office setting beyond four walls. Though telecommuters are not in your office space, as a safety officer you should still invoke a positive culture of safety that can apply no matter where your workers might be.

And with that flat-world idea, communication and collaboration, not to mention sales pitches,  contract signings and the like, can now be done outside of an office setting. People can conference call, video call, check and send e-mails, give PowerPoint presentations and do invoicing from their portable devices on a plane, on a train, at a coffee shop or in the middle of the Navajo Nation.

As a safety officer or supervisor, your office space has just expanded exponentially to cover regional sales routes or even your international client base where your employees or administrators travel.  And the reality is that, as a safety officer, you can no longer  accept no responsibility or assume no responsibility for employees who are on the move for business-related purposes.

Safety has to go out that front door in your workers’ briefcases. But how to do it? It is an interesting question that Peylina Chu tried to address earlier this year in a blog post for Entrepreneur magazine. She admitted that it may seem easy for workplace supervisors or manages to actually want to restrict the various working options in order to have better control over safety – but it doesn’t have to be that way if the company embraces its versatility and develops a safety culture that addresses every workplace environment – from the board room to the office to the airplane to the client’s conference room in Liechtenstein.

Three basic principles of safety can be put in place  in a flat-world office, Chu wrote:

  1. Identify risks everywhere. Chu says it is important for safety officers to know  where their employees do their work, and to instill proactive safety guidelines for  each site. Everywhere your employees work can be considered a workplace hot-spot, and thus proper workplace safety protocols should be implemented. Not taking this seriously or having too casual an attitude may give the impression that the company doesn’t care about employees, and that may affect the ability to have the best and brightest on the payroll. After all, we all want to know we’re important, right?
  2. Design and put procedures in place. This includes prioritizing what you need, working from where the most wide-spread risks and safety needs are and putting that in the middle of concentric circles, working out from the middle. This will include not only ana assessment of your virtual workers (such as cybersecurity threats so that communication lines are kept open and work computers or smartphones are working properly, as an example), but that goes for your in-office workers as well – making sure they have ergonomic furniture, know how to work the equipment, and they have the right secure tools to be able to touch base with the virtual workers as needed.
  3. Cultivate a culture. If a company can describe how its safety policies relate back to company goals and objectives, that can help motivate all employees to take personal accountability for their safety even when they are out of the office. Much of this can be had by having active and open communication between managers, supervisors and employees, in which concerns are heard and addressed in a prompt manner and there is consistent feedback in both directions to ensure trust and confidence in the safety measures that are adopted. (I wrote about this communication in an earlier post.)

If you would like to read Chu’s entire blog post, check out this link.