To find out more about risk management systems and resources to deploy across your client’s business and workforce, visit www.archbusinessprotection.co.uk
If your client is moving to remote working from home in response to Covid-19, here are five key considerations they may need to address from a health and safety perspective.
They may need to complete a Risk Assessment.
The Risk Assessment and its control measures will need to address issues such as:
- Ensuring a safe working environment in the home; As the employer, they are still responsible for their employees’ working environment and the equipment they use, even in own their home. This will include electrical safety, manual handling, the workstation, use of display screen equipment and slips, trips and falls.
- Creating employee awareness of the risks of their homeworking environment; it’s their home so they may be de-sensitised to risk, so building awareness of risk in their homeworking environment is essential.
- Communicating their homeworking policy/procedures; including when incidents/accidents occur.
- Addressing Individual circumstances; for instance, if the employee has a disability or physical condition that needs specific consideration.
- Monitoring that the environment and their employee remains safe.
If you or your clients need assistance, here’s how we may be able to help.
- Produce a Risk Assessment; you can develop this in the Risk Assessment module. If you need further support, you can contact our Engagement Team. You might want to build a checklist that employees complete in the Checklist module on the Arch Business Protection website.
- Deliver training via e-learning; there are additional courses for Homeworking for Employees and Managers that can be added to your e-learning suite; this takes 5 minutes.
- Distribute policies and procedures using ShareTrak; an additional module that allows you to distribute policies and track that employees have downloaded the document and have either “read and understood” or “not understood”. The employee can then flag up any queries.
- Monitor the employee’s environment; this can be achieved using the Assessment function which is the third component of the e-learning module and has the employee effectively reporting on their remote working environment. Equally, employees could be completing a checklist which could also be set to alert you around critical risks and low levels of compliance.