The company’s equipment fleet now lives in two places: half in the office, half in colleagues’ homes. Property insurance’s basic rule – that cover lives at the premises – collides with this way of working. The good news: there’s a ready-made set of solutions for it.
- Premises-based cover does not, by default, extend to company equipment kept at home.
- The solution: off-site cover – typically with a sum-insured limit and a defined territory.
- A colleague’s home insurance typically does not cover company equipment – it’s not worth relying on this.
Why doesn’t it just work automatically?
Property insurance is tied to the place of risk – the addresses listed in the policy: the place-of-risk rule. A colleague’s living room is typically not on that list, and in practice it’s rarely worth listing every home address – so the usual solution is off-premises cover: a component that protects the company’s equipment outside the premises too, up to a set limit and within a defined territory (typically within the country, sometimes Europe): details here.
What about a colleague’s home insurance?
A common assumption is that “the colleague’s home insurance will cover it”. Typically, it won’t: home insurance protects the household’s own contents, and can exclude, or apply a narrow limit to, property owned by the employer – the home-and-company-property article covers this boundary. From the company’s side, it wouldn’t be a good solution anyway: the company’s cover shouldn’t depend on employees’ individual policies.
The practical setup
Three steps: a list – which items are permanently or regularly off the premises (a deployment log also serves as evidence at claim time); cover – the off-site element’s limit matched to the real value held outside; and a rule – an internal equipment-use policy (who can take what, where, and how it should be stored). Theft-risk requirements apply here too – a laptop left visibly in a car is a classic dispute case. It’s worth adding equipment movement to the annual review as well: the annual routine.
The home-office question can also be settled on the employment-contract side: who’s responsible for the equipment, what to do at claim time, how it gets returned. The insurance cover and the internal policy together make a complete solution – I provide guidance on both at the survey, and the company’s lawyer puts the legal details into final form.
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