Working From Home – Knowing Your Responsibilities

Do you fully understand the risk of home-working and do you have in place suitable control measures to ensure home workers are safe as the law requires?

It is becoming more and more popular these days for staff to work from home, and especially during this coronavirus outbreak.

Governments are asking workers to work from home, but what they are not asking you to do is to break the law – Health and Safety Law.

As an employer, you have the same health and safety responsibilities for home workers as for any other workers.

Whether the worker is full or part-time or on an infrequent basis, they are still ‘at work’ and whilst they are doing their job it is important that you take adequate steps to ensure their safety and wellbeing whilst undertaking the companies work tasks.

A lot of the work carried out at home is going to be low-risk, office type work or simple activities, but still the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has the right to visit home-working employees, as they would do at their main place of work.

Challenging

It can be challenging to understand how you will assess the worker/s home, but as the guidance from the HSE states, you are only looking at the hazards and risks whilst they are working.

You really only need to assess their designated work area – may be a study or make-shift office, there therefore is no need for you to worry about other areas of the home such as a loose floor tile in the kitchen, guitar lead left across the dining room floor or the dog bed in the hallway.

You do however need to do a risk assessment of the employees’ work activities, as you would with all other employees who are at work.

Look at additional risk assessments for the ambulant, young persons and new and expectant mothers.

What should you look for?

Here are some common areas highlighted by the HSE to include in your assessment:

• DSE (Display Screen Equipment) – The use of computers tablets and even smartphones at home, still requires you make an assessment.
• Slips and Trips – The majority of slips and trips are caused by obstructions in walkways, bad flooring, footwear and uneven surfaces. So look to good housekeeping around the workstation or work area, especially if the home worker is going to have colleagues or customers visiting.
• Manual handling – The law requires you to assess the loads that might be carried, as injuries can occur almost anywhere, even while working at home. Assess the risks and put sensible health and safety measures in place to avoid injury.
• Electrical items – Ensure that the equipment that you provide is safe for use. You are only required to provide PAT testing for the equipment that the employer is supplying, so you don’t have to check all the electrical items around the workers home.
• Stress – Employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work, so do a risk assessment as you would if the worker was working from the office. The type of thing you may want to add additionally could be ‘low communication with colleagues’ – the banter in the canteen area. Provide information on how the worker can best deal with this. Detail regular breaks and may be contact other colleagues regularly.
• Lone working without supervision – There will always be greater risks for lone workers with no direct supervision or anyone to help them if things go wrong. Keep in touch with lone workers, including those working from home, and ensure regular contact to make sure they are healthy and safe.
• Data protection – Employees working from home are responsible for complying with data protection law and for keeping all documents and information associated with the organisation secure at all times

Remember, most of the normal health and safety legislation applies to workers working from their home.

Make sure you point out the importance of reporting problems and accidents which would otherwise go un-noted, and devise a way of recording these in your accident book or other company records.

Can Safety PAL help?

Most certainly, but first take a look at the Good Practice pages and Health and Safety Executive (HSE) guidance which is free for you to use. We have included downloadable PDFs and links:

RR262 – Health and Safety of Homeworks: Good Practice Case Studies:
http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrpdf/rr262.pdf

Guidance for employers on health and safety:
http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg226.pdf

Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Protect Home Workers:
https://www.hse.gov.uk/toolbox/workers/home.htm

If after reading the guidance documents, you need help putting together a risk assessment, policy, accident recording, completing and evidencing DSE assessments or any other required items which you need to ensure compliance, we are here to help, so please get in touch with us here