Adapting health and safety management for remote and hybrid workers
The landscape of work has changed dramatically for many people over the last five years. So how can we ensure that staff are kept safe, wherever they are based? Bridget Leathley offers some key advice.
We know the history: lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to work from home if they could, and to minimise contact with other workers where they couldn’t. Office workers received laptops in the post and worked from dining room tables. Essential workers, such as those maintaining electricity, water, telephone and gas supplies had to adapt to reduce contact with other colleagues. This included taking company vehicles home to avoid visits to a depot at the start and end of each shift.
Employees could see some benefits in these changes which they wanted to keep post-lockdown. Office workers could move from bed to breakfast to work in ten minutes, while utility workers could clock on from the vehicles on their driveways.
Employers too wanted to benefit from these changes. When leases ran out, businesses and public organisations reduced their office space – giving up a floor or letting go of whole buildings. Five years on from the pandemic, organisations are still working through the implications of hybrid working (where people combine elements of a ‘normal’ workplace with working elsewhere). For example, the UK Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) closed over 40 offices in 2024.
Maintaining a smaller number of busy hub offices is more cost-effective than managing offices which are nearly empty most days. Smaller companies let go of permanent sites altogether, booking space in hotels for staff gatherings or client meetings.
Utility companies also realised they could reap the benefits by closing down some of their depots. Workers could continue to keep vehicles at home, visiting a more distant depot when they need to collect equipment.
The move away from a fixed place to travel to each day provides greater flexibility, providing opportunities for employees to improve their work-life balance and employers to save money. However, many traditional safety controls rely on working together, supervision and centrally provided resources – without these, we need to rethink how we assess and manage risk.
What we’ve lost
Alongside the benefits of remote working (whether at home or mobile) and hybrid working, we need to consider what we’ve lost.
The shared office or depot provided a common meeting place and time for catching up with colleagues and managers. Many depots had canteens, so the day started with a chat over a bacon sandwich. Daily touch points provided opportunities for toolbox talks or training sessions.
Effective supervision in a workplace ensures everyone understands how to work safely. Workers can check with colleagues when they’re not sure what to do next. Alone, at home, in a vehicle or on a worksite, people need to be supported in other ways.
Depots and offices provided a clear start and end to a working day. For home, mobile and hybrid working, managers and workers need to be clear about expectations for working hours and response out of hours.
Training
While e-learning has its place as part of a competence programme, it can often lack a process for checking if people can apply new skills. On-the-job training is still important, but many mobile teams have been cut to the minimum because increased competition has reduced the margins on jobs. Hence, there are fewer opportunities for new workers to learn from experienced staff.
Organisations need to determine what competencies are needed, and plan how competence will be assessed - for example, having a list of the tasks associated with each role, and trained assessors visiting jobsites to verify that competency. They could also consider immersive reality options, such as a VR experience of entering a maintenance hole to show competence in accessing confined spaces.
Equipment
Vehicles parked at a depot could be maintained and checked regularly, equipped with ladders that had been inspected and electrical tools that had been tested, and stocked with in-date supplies. However, when a work vehicle is parked outside a worker’s house every night, more effort is often needed to make sure all tools and vehicles are on an inventory that triggers reminders when checks are required. Workers need to make their own pre-use checks and should be provided with spares for any safety critical equipment (including personal protective equipment).
Remote workers might need some additional motivation for pre-work or post-work checks. Checklists can become a pointless and time-consuming tick box exercise. Photos can help in some situations – for example, mobile workers can take a photo of their ladder set-up before climbing, or a cleared worksite when a job is completed.
Ergonomic rethink
Musculoskeletal disorders are the second largest cause of people taking time off work (after stress, depression and anxiety). In a factory managers can design, control and monitor manual handling tasks to reduce risk. But mobile workers might be faced with ground surfaces which make it difficult to use handling aids, and travel distances which increase the risk of carrying. Off-the-shelf manual handling training tends to focus on ‘how to lift, carry and lower’ but mobile workers need to know how to dynamically assess the risk of handling tasks they face, and be given the time and resources to reduce the risk. Do they need trolleys with more robust wheels? Or lighter equipment? Prior planning can help, for example making sure customers know what is expected of them.
Employers have generally been quite good at offering desk-based homeworkers advice on display screen equipment (DSE) set-up, encouraging short breaks and providing extra equipment where needed. But showing a driver how to adjust the seat in their vehicle is much rarer, and perhaps more important, especially as fewer depots can mean longer drives for mobile workers, and drivers are fixed behind the wheel until the next stop. Computer users are advised to take a break at least once an hour – best advice for drivers is once in two hours, and even that is not achieved by many. Increasing use of electric vehicles provides more opportunities for natural breaks, where the driver can have a break while the vehicle recharges, but work planning should also encourage frequent breaks.
Alone but not unsupported
The co-ordination of work that used to take place at a fixed workplace must now be done remotely.
For office workers, co-ordination of work tends to happen at their desk (or dining room table), via emails, project management systems or online meetings.
For mobile workers, specialised worker management software is often used to match skills, location and availability to jobs. Some workers will meet other colleagues once they get to the worksite, but others work on their own. Lone workers are at greater risk of violence from members of the public, or from more severe consequences if they have an accident and no one is around to help. Body worn cameras and lone worker devices which track location can overcome some of these hazards. Driving to and from sites is an especially hazardous part of a mobile worker’s day. Telematics systems in vehicles can collect, store and transmit data about speed and location, acceleration, braking and other vehicle performance factors (such as fuel economy).
While worker management systems, cameras, vehicle trackers and lone worker devices help to overcome some of the hazards of mobile work, they can in turn create new problems. Workers might feel job allocation is arbitrary or unfair, and they can no longer negotiate swaps with colleagues or supervisors as they would have done at the depot. Some feel that cameras and tracking devices are oppressive, intended to monitor rather than protect, with workers feeling micromanaged and stressed by the constant monitoring.
Any such technology should be introduced in collaboration with those who will use it, and managers must stick to any agreements about how the information can be used. Expectations must be met – if a lone worker uses technology to call for help and none arrives, confidence will disappear.
Removing the daily touch points with colleagues removes social support and can result in a sense of isolation. Sending a job request on an app seems more efficient than a long chat about your weekend before being assigned a task, but those conversations were valuable. They were opportunities for managers to understand what else was happening, for workers to raise concerns, and for important messages to be passed on. When the depot manager explained how the latest safety bulletin applied to today’s job, it had more impact than the safety bulletin in an attachment to an email received on a phone.
For remote and homeworkers, managers and supervisors need to ensure they check-in regularly, face-to-face where practical, and at least with a voice call rather than a text message when it’s not.
