Insurance for Remote Employees: What Ontario Employers Actually Need

If any of your employees work from home — even one day a week — your business insurance probably has gaps you don't know about.

We hear the same assumption from business owners across Durham Region all the time: "They're just working from their kitchen table. Their home insurance covers that, right?" Wrong. Their home insurance explicitly excludes your business activities. And your standard commercial policy was probably written when every employee worked from the same office.

Remote and hybrid work has become permanent for a large portion of Ontario's workforce. As of late 2024, roughly one in four Canadian workers still operates remotely or in a hybrid arrangement. That shift created real insurance exposures — from equipment sitting in employees' living rooms to cyber threats coming through unsecured home networks. Ontario's legislation has been catching up too, with the Working for Workers Five Act (Bill 190) expanding employer obligations for remote workers effective October 2024.

Here are the five coverage areas we tell every Ontario employer with remote staff to review immediately.

1. WSIB Coverage Still Applies at Home

This is the one that surprises most employers. Your WSIB obligations do not stop at your office door.

For employers registered with the WSIB, coverage extends to employees working from home as long as the injury occurs in the course of employment. The Board evaluates home-based claims using three factors:

• Time — Did the injury happen during regular work hours?
• Place — Did it happen in the employee's designated workspace?
• Activity — Was the employee performing a work-related task?

The activity factor carries the most weight. The WSIB draws a clear line: an employee who falls off their office chair while on a work call is covered. An employee who slips in their kitchen making dinner is not — even if it happens during work hours.

What this means for employers: You still need to report work-from-home injuries on Form 7 within three days. Having a written remote work agreement on file helps the WSIB adjudicate claims and protects you from ambiguous situations. If an employee works remotely from outside Ontario, WSIB automatically covers them for up to six months — beyond that, you need to request an extension.

2. Your Commercial Property Policy Probably Doesn't Cover Equipment in Their Home

Company-owned laptops, monitors, phones, and other hardware sitting in your employees' homes represent real property exposure. Here is the coverage gap most businesses miss: standard commercial property policies cover assets at your listed business premises. Equipment at an employee's residence is off-premises — and it may not be covered at all without an endorsement.

Meanwhile, your employee's personal home insurance is no help. Ontario home insurance policies typically cap business equipment coverage at around $2,500 and exclude liability for business-related losses entirely. If a power surge destroys a $3,000 laptop and two monitors at your employee's home, neither your standard commercial policy nor their home insurance may cover it.

What you need: Talk to your broker about an off-premises equipment extension or an inland marine (equipment floater) endorsement on your commercial property policy. These cover company-owned property wherever it goes — employees' homes, coffee shops, client sites. The cost is modest relative to the value of equipment most remote teams use daily.

If you have employees using their own personal devices for work (BYOD), that creates a different set of problems. Their personal devices are their property, not yours, but if those devices store your client data and get stolen, you have a data breach on your hands. Cyber insurance (see below) is the answer for that exposure.

3. Cyber Insurance Is No Longer Optional

This is the coverage area where remote work has done the most damage to businesses. Every employee working from home is a potential entry point into your company's network — and threat actors know it.

The numbers are stark. According to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security's National Cyber Threat Assessment, remote access tools like VPNs and RDP were the entry point for roughly two-thirds of ransomware attacks in 2024. The CIRA 2025 Cybersecurity Survey found that 43% of Canadian organizations were targeted by a cyber attack in the past 12 months, and 42% experienced a breach of customer or employee data.

Remote workers are particularly vulnerable because they often connect through home Wi-Fi networks that lack enterprise-grade security, use personal devices that may not have current patches, and are more susceptible to phishing attacks when working in isolation. The average cost of a data breach in Canada reached $4.66 million USD, and that figure includes breach response, forensics, client notification, regulatory penalties, and lost business.

What cyber insurance covers: A good cyber liability policy covers first-party costs (forensic investigation, data recovery, business interruption, ransom payments) and third-party costs (client notification, credit monitoring, regulatory fines, legal defence). It also typically includes access to a breach response team that can help you contain the damage in the critical first hours.

We write cyber policies for businesses of every size — from five-person offices to large commercial operations. If your employees access company systems remotely, this is not a policy you should go without. Get a quote here.

4. CGL and Employers' Liability Need a Second Look

Your commercial general liability (CGL) policy protects your business when a third party — a client, vendor, or member of the public — is injured or suffers property damage because of your operations. But CGL policies were designed around traditional workplaces. With remote employees, two issues come up:

Location restrictions. Some CGL policies define your "premises" narrowly. If a remote employee causes a liability incident from their home — say, a client visits for a meeting and trips on equipment cords — your CGL may not respond if the employee's home is not a recognized business location. Review your policy's premises definition with your broker.

Employers' liability gaps. WSIB provides no-fault coverage for workplace injuries, and in return, employees give up the right to sue. But not every worker is covered by WSIB. Contract workers, independent consultants, and certain part-time staff may fall outside your WSIB registration. If one of them is injured while working remotely and sues your company, you need employers' liability insurance to cover the legal costs and potential settlement. This is separate from your WSIB premiums and often included as part of a commercial package policy.

5. New OHSA Obligations for Remote Workers (Bill 190)

Ontario's Working for Workers Five Act, which received Royal Assent on October 28, 2024, made two significant changes that directly affect employers with remote staff:

The OHSA now applies to telework in private residences. Previously, the Occupational Health and Safety Act's application to home offices was legally ambiguous. Bill 190 resolved that — the OHSA now explicitly applies to telework performed in or about a private residence. Employers must take every reasonable precaution to protect remote workers' health and safety, just as they would for on-site staff. That said, the industrial establishment regulations do not apply to home offices, so you are not required to treat an employee's spare bedroom like a factory floor.

Virtual harassment is now workplace harassment. The definition of workplace harassment under the OHSA was amended to include harassment that occurs "virtually through the use of information and communications technology." If an employee is being harassed over Slack, Teams, email, or video calls, that is now explicitly a workplace harassment matter under the Act — with all the same employer obligations for investigation and response.

What this means for your insurance: These expanded obligations increase your exposure. If the Ministry of Labour investigates a remote workplace safety complaint or a virtual harassment claim and finds your company failed to take reasonable precautions, the legal and financial consequences are real. Your CGL, employers' liability, and potentially your directors and officers (D&O) coverage all become relevant.

What to Do Right Now

If you have remote or hybrid employees, here is our recommended action list:

1. Pull out your commercial policy and read the premises definition. If it only lists your office address, call your broker. You need coverage that follows your operations to wherever your people work.
2. Inventory company-owned equipment at employees' homes. Know exactly what hardware is out there and confirm your commercial property policy covers it off-premises.
3. Get a cyber insurance quote if you don't already have coverage. This is the single biggest gap we see in Ontario businesses with remote staff. Start a quote with us — we can usually find competitive options quickly.
4. Put a written remote work agreement in place. This is not just good HR practice. The WSIB specifically notes that formal remote work policies help adjudicate home-based injury claims. Document the designated workspace, expected work hours, and equipment provided.
5. Review your OHSA compliance for remote workers. Make sure your workplace harassment policy explicitly covers virtual harassment, and document the reasonable precautions you are taking for remote worker safety.
6. Talk to your broker. Seriously. A 30-minute policy review can identify gaps that would cost you tens of thousands to discover through a denied claim. Our team reviews remote work exposures as a standard part of every commercial insurance consultation — call us at (905) 576-7770 or request a quote online.

Remote work is not going away. Your insurance needs to reflect the way your business actually operates — not the way it operated five years ago. The good news is that closing these gaps is straightforward once you know where to look. That is exactly what we do.