Working from home is workable on paper but hard to implement!
As business owners the COVID-19 pandemic has presented us with a series of challenges to navigate none more so than the impact it’s having on our people;
- IT stress testing, making sure that your systems will work for employees working from home
- Mental health and wellbeing – especially for the mid to long term and reports suggest we are all in this for several months
- How do we keep our people engaged?
- How do we maintain staff morale in these unprecedented times?
- Of course, business planning for the future, when we come through the other side
At the Risk Dashboard our advisory platform has already identified that the majority of SME’s have relatively poor levels of protection for business continuity plans in a crisis such as this.
One certain scenario is that businesses have never assumed that the majority of the workforce will now be working from home, and how do they support their people and their families that are affected by COVID-19 and how is this communicated across the business?
Business owners need to ensure mechanisms are in place and that any issues can be quickly escalated.
This past week the Risk Dashboard has teamed up with its parent company Business Safety Systems to develop a stand-alone module – ‘Home Worker Management System’ designed to help business owners manage their ‘working from home’ people obligations.
- Health and Safety at Work Act 1974
As employers we have the same legal responsibilities for home workers as we have for any other worker. The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 is the primary piece of legislation covering Occupational Health and Safety in Great Britain.
Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 specifies the general duties of an employer to their employees. This includes the duty to ensure as far as reasonably practicable the Health, Safety and Welfare at work of all of their employees. We must keep those employees informed of policies and procedures which may affect their undertakings.
This may include your working at home policy, your requirements for risk assessments and your COVID-19 response policy.
In order to ensure your employees’ safety, an assessment of risks must be completed.
- Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999
Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999; specifically, Regulation 3 which requires every employer to make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to health and safety of their employees to which they are exposed while they are at work.
The Business Safety Systems – ‘Home Worker Management System’ has a number of key features to help maximise business efficiency, when your staff may not have access to their usual equipment or work environment due to the COVID-19 out break;
- Video Training – Home Work Station set-up
- Risk Assessment – Display Screen Equipment at Home
- Asset Checklist – Display Screen Assessment at Home
- Employee Health Status – allowing for reporting of current health status; Healthy, Self Isolating, Contracted Coronovirus, Recovered
- Management Reporting – Employee Health Status, Training Completion, Employee Asset List, Home Assessment Scores, Alerts for Health Status Changes
If you would like to learn more about the ‘Home Worker Management System’ and how you can support your people ‘Working from Home’ contact your Accountant / Business Advisor or local Chamber of Commerce and ask for a licence or contact Neil Campbell, Commercial Director at Risk Dashboard on neil.campbell@riskdashboard.co.uk or info@riskdashboard.co.uk.
We look forward to hearing from you.
This product is for healthy people working from home, we are advising all employees to take health advice relating to the COVID-19 outbreak from trusted government sources – these sources are available by links from the system.
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