Why workstation assessments are as important as a hard hat or a safety harness

If you wound the clock back about 30 years ago and spent sometime on a building site of some new build homes you'd notice a stark difference to what you would see happening on site today. Today we would see a safety check in point, health and safety check point, first aid station, a dedicated team to ensure the safety on site and strict rules on preventing injury or death and a lot of paperwork in the event of an accident. 

Now early on in this adoption you'd have been met with a lot of resistance and flack from the staff on site and their employers. The air would have been blue with things like: 'Red tape', 'bureaucracy', 'Brussels', 'Health and safety gone mad'. With the feeling of slowing down productivity and increasing costs. But what we'd come to accept was injury and deaths as the normal in the building trade and now you look back on it you can see the progress on where we've come. The London 2012 Olympics was the first ever recorded where a death had not occurred as part of the Olympic village build or stadium build. It's quite staggering to think it took until 2012 for this to be achieved.

Slowly we're starting to see the same thing happen in the office environment. Previously we'd have thought it could only be some paper cuts and a spilt coffee cup that we would have been wary of. However there's much more focus on how our office environments are making our staff less healthy, happy and productive. HSE law states for example that even if you're a company and you hire the services of a self employed contractor who isn't even working onsite with you, then you are responsible for the workstation that they are sat at. This is due to the fact they are carrying out work for your company. Sounds ridiculous doesn't it. But if you flipped it around and thought about it from a construction environment with a comparison example you'd start to see the logic.

 Say you fixed chimney's for your local area as a limited company, say you're called "Poorly Pots". One week there's terrible storms and chimneys are collapsing all over town. The phones off the hook with customers and your three employed builders can't meet demand. So you call on a self employed contact, Bob, who's up for some gig work and you send him to the Jones residence, he then falls off the roof, damages it and the customer is left waiting four hours for an Ambulance with the poor chap, Bob. All of a sudden you're quick option of a sub contractor with no regard for H&S is in bits and it's your fault. Your company name and your conscience.

There have been many reported successful cases of employment tribunal legal cases where the workstation has caused RSI or persistent back pack. This would have been where a DSE assessment wasn't carried out or was ignored when an employee raised concerns or started to have sick days due to it. This could have been an inadequate chair or broken chair which doesn't support the user. Other known cases are the type of desk or workstation offered, such as a reception desk which causes over stretching or awkward twisting. 

Your best bet it to avoid a situation would be to look in to your DSE assessments for all your staff, including yourself. You can do this by bringing in an external firm to carry these out or you can send one or two of your own employees on a days course to competently carry these out. Each assessment takes around 30 minutes to complete and will raise any concerns mentioned or spotted with another pair of eyes. This can then be documented, actioned on and improved things. This way you're doing the best for your employees and keeping them safe and happy!