What is a homeworker?
A homeworker is someone whose fixed place of work is their home. Throughout the pandemic, millions of UK employees have been forced to work from home and many businesses may even look to make that a more permanent fixture. With that in mind, employers need to make sure that their employees can work from home safely and productively.
“As an employer, you have the same health and safety responsibilities for home workers as for any other workers.”
What is a Homeworking Assessment and why are they important?
A Homeworking Assessment (or a Homeworking Risk Assessment) helps those who work from home identify and assess risks associated with their workstation and the nature of homeworking.
Risk assessments are a basic legal requirement and should be carried out for every employee, not just homeworkers. However, the risks to homeworkers can often differ from your standard employee, so it’s important that you identify these risks.
According to the Office for National Statistics, since the start of the pandemic in April 2020, nearly half (46.6%) of people in employment did some of their work from home. And where homeworking is likely to maintain its popularity, it’s important that those who do work from home are offered full support by their employers.
How often should they be carried out?
There’s no legal time frame for when Homeworking Assessments should be reviewed. However, as a general rule of thumb, it’s best to review your assessments once a year. It’s also advised that assessments should be reviewed if something changes in your business or to a job role that may increase the risk to an individual.
How does iHasco’s tool work?
Our online Homeworking Assessment Tool is built into our Health & Safety for Homeworkers Training course. Users complete our high-quality eLearning course and are provided with the assessment upon completion of the course. Once the user has completed their assessment, training administrators can pull reports and are notified of any issues occurring from an assessment. Administrators can identify, prioritise, and quickly resolve any issues and keep end-users updated.
How much does it cost?
Our Homeworking Assessment Tool comes included as part of our Health & Safety for Homeworkers Training course. Pricing for our training is dependent on the number of users you need to undertake the training. For a bespoke, cost-effective quote, get in touch with us today via our quote request page.