What started during the pandemic is now an established practice. While less of us work from home than we did during the lockdown period, data from the Office for National Statistics show that in early 2023, 16% still do – and 28% work in a hybrid pattern of home and office work.
For an employer, this means that a sizeable number of staff aren’t present in the office, and this presents challenges in terms of their safety and wellbeing. This article has been written to highlight the risks and show some of the ways you can help your employees work effectively from home, while looking after their safety and wellbeing.
Safety at home – what do we mean exactly?
Safety is a very general term so applying it to work can make it a broad topic. So, for the purposes of this article, we are going to look at areas where we know employers can make a difference. These are burnout and mental health, self-care, workstation setup and help with managing personal finances, also known as financial wellbeing.
The impact of home life on work
Our lives outside work are linked to our effectiveness in work – whether that work takes place in an office or from home. Employers can’t expect their people to work at their best and most productive if they aren’t aware of the issues and challenges faced at home. What’s more, home working, while enjoyed by many for its flexibility, also risks employers being unaware of the impact of working long hours.
Working from home and burnout
Burnout is a condition that affects mental health and often happens when employees work longer hours and aren’t aware that they are putting themselves at risk. Working on a report late into the evening, meeting deadlines and answering emails over the weekend all create a gradual buildup of behaviours that can create burnout. And the worst part is that this can seem perfectly normal to the employee even though what is actually happening is that they don’t switch off from work. Often this goes unseen when it happens at home.
Home working and safe mental health
Burnout is just one of the risks associated with working from home. Another is social exclusion. Even if someone chooses to work from home it doesn’t stop them missing out on the interactions that come with working with others in the same physical space. Over time this can impact on our mental health. Here are some mental health tips for employees as well as line managers:
– Employees:
- Take regular breaks from your work – just as you would if you were in the office. And please do take all your annual holiday.
- Try going for a walk either at the start or the end of the day. This gives you exercise and also helps to create a ‘divide’ from home and work, a little like a commute to and from work.
- If possible, try to create your home workspace away from the parts of your home where you enjoy your home life.
- Be aware of the hours you work and try and keep to the same hours that you would if in the office. Tell your line manager if you feel your hours are getting longer and you are struggling to cope. Remember, they can only help you manage this if they are also aware of the situation.
– Line managers:
- Keep in regular touch with homeworkers in your team. You can’t manage situations that you aren’t aware of.
- With mental health now a much more open and discussed topic, let your employees know that their mental health comes first and that there is support for them at any time.
- Organise regular opportunities for team interaction, even if it’s only online. Actual office visits are better at helping your people build and maintain the social bonds they need to feel a part of a team.
Encouraging self-care
Self-care is linked very closely to mental health and can have a positive influence on it. So, taking time for yourself at home is very important. It can help you to unwind after a long day or it can help to reset your mental state.
The ways we look after ourselves will of course vary. There are some general approaches that will always help, such as:
- Making sure you eat a balanced diet and staying healthy through regular exercise is a good way to start.
- Removing yourself from ‘work mode’ by taking in part in wellbeing activities such as meditation, yoga, cooking healthy food can all help to create that boundary that is often missing in home working.
- Keeping warm in the winter months, getting outside to experience natural daylight and lighting a candle all help to create a more positive state of wellbeing.
The important thing about self-care is not what it looks like but how it makes you feel.
Workstation and ergonomic setup
Working from home can bring many positives in terms of flexibility and wellbeing, but it can also introduce health risks. One of these can arise from a poor workstation setup. As an employee you can manage the risks of working from home by setting up a healthy workstation – and as an employer, you have a duty to ensure your employee is working with the necessary equipment and setup knowledge. Employers can help by doing a risk assessment to identify what should be improved – something that is especially important for those with a disability.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) runs training for employers and employees to understand what good posture looks like when using display screen equipment at home or in the workplace. This page contains a number of tips for good posture. https://www.hse.gov.uk/msd/dse/good-posture.htm
Financial wellbeing
Good financial wellbeing helps all employees to enjoy better mental health and enables them to focus on their work and productivity. More employers are realising just how challenged some people have been by the cost-of-living crisis and are now taking action to help and this is much needed. CIPD research finds that over a quarter (28%) of employees say money worries have impacted their work performance, most commonly through lost sleep, health problems such as stress or anxiety which affects their ability to concentrate at work.
Being away from the workplace can make these problems even worse with no one to talk to, and often unaware of the help that is there to support them through difficult times. We wrote this recent article to help employers develop a financial wellbeing strategy. All the advice is equally applicable to those working from home.
Additional source of information
We’ve written a guide to help employers and employees understand how the issues in this article impact their ability to work safely at home. Containing many links for sources of information and help, the guide is available to download from our wellbeing subscription site.
If you’d like to know more about this service, please get in touch.
In conclusion
The home is for many also a workplace – and this brings both freedom and flexibility as well as risks to safety. Home working, without supervision or contact from the employer can be the start of mental health problems caused by long hours, the risk of burnout, social exclusion, anxiety and all of this before the physical risks of workstation setup are considered. Just as employees need to be mindful of the downside of home working as well as the positives, employers have a duty of care to ensure they can do so as safely as possible.
