How to Stay Safe When Working from Home
When Covid-19 hit and began to affect the labour market, many employees and businesses envisaged a scenario where remote working would become the norm.
Although this may be partially true, it’s the hybrid working model that appears to have become increasingly commonplace and popular between employees and employers alike. Statistics certainly suggest that 78% of employees welcome a hybrid working arrangement as it leads to a better work-life balance, while spending more time working flexibly from home improved the wellbeing of 47% of respondents.
With hybrid working requiring you to split your time between the workplace and your home, this results in you spending much more time out of the office and frees up the time you would usually spend commuting. In this post, we’ll look at how you can stay safe and prioritise your wellbeing and health while working from home.
Set Boundaries
People react differently to working from home. For example, while some tend to work quicker away from the social distractions of the office, others can feel a little too relaxed and struggle to focus on their job.
Their routine may also incorporate down time, extended lunches and household chores, making it hard to optimise your productivity during a typical working day.
With this in mind, it’s imperative that you set clear and disciplined boundaries between your home and work life at all times, creating fixed and manageable hours that enable you to focus on your day job.
Try to set up a dedicated workspace and clearly signpost to your family when you need to be left alone to do your work, as they can often be a big distraction during working hours. Similarly, you should leave your laptop and any other work-related items in this space outside of work in order to be able to completely switch off and relax in your own time.
Set Your Home Workspace Up Safely
When you work in an office, your employer is obliged to provide a health and safety risk assessment before optimising your own personal workspace.
This will include making provisions for wrist rests, a supportive chair and monitor riser, while the entire space should be ergonomically designed and laid out to optimise your comfort and physical wellbeing at all times.
This can be much harder to do properly in your home office, but be sure to focus on your comfort and ensuring that you have the correct posture, you can do this by investing in your own monitor riser and ensuring that the chair is set at the correct height. This can also help reduce eye strain, but it’s still worthwhile to keep the solution for your contact lenses nearby at all times to prevent them from drying out during extended periods of work and screentime.
Some workplaces offer to buy or lend wrist rests and other support aids so it may be worthwhile contacting your employee to see if they can help in creating a safe home office environment.
Take Breaks and Minimise Risks
On a similar note, you can also optimise your eye and mental health by taking regular breaks from your screen, ideally moving away from the display for five minutes every 20-25 minutes or so.
How you spend this time is up to you, whether you refill your drink and get a snack or take a short walk to stretch your legs.
These steps also enable you to minimise the risk of long-term mental or physical issues, and this is another keyway of staying safe when working from home. Try to conduct a detailed risk assessment of your home office or workspace, taking the time to identify any particular tripping hazards (such as exposed cables) or bare electricals.
Try to be as thorough as possible when carrying out this type of assessment, as this ensures that you cover as many safety bases as possible.