Our Tips For Staying Safe When You Are Working From Home

The Covid outbreak changed all our lives in so many ways including many people being forced to work from home. While life has now largely returned to normal the pandemic resulted in a rethink around our way of life and many organisations and businesses are now allowing staff to work either entirely at home, or in new hybrid working arrangements where some time is spent in the office and the rest at home.

Home working was not a popular option for everyone and depended very much on your living arrangements but for those who have embraced the opportunity to work from home it has allowed them to benefit enormously in terms of quality of life and a feeling of achieving a greater work/life balance.

There are numerous advantages to working from home including no travelling time and commuting costs and even the opportunity to avoid interaction with colleagues that you don’t much like! You may well be saving money on petrol, car maintenance, parking costs, bus or train fares but this will be balanced by household bills as you will be using more water, electricity and heating during the day at home.

In this article, we want to focus on some of the potential risks and hazards to enable you to stay safe. If you were in the office, the likelihood is that your employer would take responsibility for fire and electrical safety as well as your general wellbeing. If you are working at home the onus will be on you to be aware of these issues.

So, what steps can you take to be sure that your homeworking set up is as safe as possible.

• Have a designated workspace. If you are working on a laptop it may be tempting to just power up in bed on cold dark mornings. We strongly recommend having some desk or table space where you can sit and work so that your laptop is on a flat hard, surface. Electrical items can get hot when in use and resting your laptop on your duvet may cause it to overheat.
• Use a proper chair to ensure that you are able to work comfortably.
• Take regular breaks from your screen to (when working at home with fewer distractions it is easy to just keep going)
• Keep any electrical items that you use in the course of your work clean and free from dust and fluff.
• Take care when charging, only use the correct charger for the item in question, avoid buying cheap chargers that may not be manufactured to safety standards. Never leave items charging overnight as you would not notice any signs of burning or fire.
• Make sure that any extension leads or cables are tucked out of the way so that they do not pose a trip hazard.
• Make sure you have sufficient smoke alarms at home and test them each week to make sure that they are in good working order.

If you find that you need to make changes to the electrical set up at home to make home working easier for you please get in touch, we offer a range of domestic electrical services.