While labourers have been doing manual piecework in their homes for hundreds of years, computer-based homeworking, or home teleworking, is a comparative newcomer.

But as numbers of home teleworkers have increased rapidly in the past decade as employers embrace flexible work patterns, pushed on by government encouragement and business demands, it is an appropriate moment to revisit homeworking health and safety issues.

Workers' and employers' general experience of  staff working all or part of the time from home has, in health and safety terms, been straightforward and positive. There have been no pandemics of upper-limb disorders; no field days for burglars; and few headaches for employers. Indeed, where employers have managed homeworking in line with good practice, guidance and common sense, they report reduced injury and sickness rates and increased productivity.

Telecoms firm BT, for example, which embraced homeworking early and with enthusiasm, claims productivity gains of between 15% and 31% among its 10,000 homeworkers, a sickness absence rate 20% below the average for all its employees, the retention of 1000 workers a year that it would otherwise have expected to lose, a 99% return rate following maternity leave (against a national average of 47%), and an annual saving for the company of £6,000 for every homeworker - mostly from freeing up city-centre office space.

Such health, safety and business returns have partial roots in the mutual desire of homeworkers and their employers to make this way of working succeed: while employers can help themselves to BT-like benefits, homeworkers can avoid journey time and aggravation, work more flexible and convenient hours, and balance work and family demands.

Such tangible gains, and the fact that employees are working in their own homes, can mean that homeworkers are likely to behave more safely than they would at their employer's premises; and employers are more likely to have thought through the health and safety aspects of the working arrangements precisely because they are something new rather than just another day at the office.

There is also a consistent body of legislation and official and professional advice: health and safety law governing homework has changed little during the past decade; it's still underpinned by the Health and Safety at Work Act and covered by the same regulations - notably those on display screen and work equipment - that control work at an employer's offices (with the notable exception of the Workplace Regulations).

Advice from the HSE has remained pretty much unchanged (its 12-page guide is at www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg226.pdf), while guidance from bodies such as the Institution of Safety and Health (IOSH) (available at www.iosh.co.uk/index.cfm?go=technical.details&scid=12), though updated in 2006, still sings from a similar hymn sheet.

Technological advances have made life easier still: 10 years ago, health and safety practitioners were looking at computer-based training and video packages and wondering whether homeworkers would be able to access all the training and information they need; today, they are more concerned about information overload.

But there have been changes in emphasis, as experience and technology have assuaged some concerns and boosted others. Equipment issues are, if not solved, then at least easily solvable, while psychosocial considerations have emerged as increasingly important and health and safety "arrangements" as an area that still needs attention. In many ways, this merely mirrors the wider picture in health and safety, regardless of where people work.

A matter of trust

From the employer's point of view, the most obvious barrier to safe and healthy homeworking is the difficulty of exercising control away from the office.

Successful homeworking depends on trust. A safety officer can carry out a basic risk assessment for an office of 30 workers in a morning; it would take as long again to visit a single homeworker. This has led to most employers asking homeworkers to fill in self-assessment questionnaires; a manager then reviews the completed forms.

This might be a safety practitioner, or a facilities, HR or line manager who refers any concerns to a safety specialist. The latter scenario is no bad thing, providing the manager handling the assessment is competent and experienced enough: in particular, they must know when to seek specialist help.

The person checking the answers - or visiting the teleworker's home if the organisation decides that's preferable - needs to assess any risks and ensure that they are managed. The assessment should cover the issues raised in this article and next month's, but it should also take particular account of expectant and new mothers, who are more likely to be working from home than many other groups of workers.

Many self-assessment questionnaires concentrate on physical hazards, because these hazards are easier to pick up on a checklist. It is more difficult to elicit information on psychosocial factors, which are hard to measure. Avoid questionnaires that result in "yes/no" answers; a questionnaire should be designed to gather information for a sound assessment, not to provide a series of ticks.

The homeworking phenomenon

Though the predictions in the mid-1990s that every office worker would end up working at their own hearths proved way off the mark, there has been a steady rise in the numbers working from home throughout the past decade. The government first started measuring people working at home who relied on computers in 1997 and found the number of employees based at home for all or part of the week was 987,000. By 2004, this had risen to 1.9 million, or 6% of the workforce.

Apart from the falling price of computer equipment and easy and cheap data connections between home and corporate centre, differing drivers contributed to the rise at various times.

The mid-1990s saw some big corporate homeworking programmes by communications companies such as BT and management consultancies involving thousands of employees, designed to save property costs and advertise the homeworking concept  to the wider business world.

These were followed by broader flexible working schemes by employers such as Lloyds TSB who were keen not to lose skilled employees with young children or other care commitments.

These latter initiatives inspired a government commitment to help employees balance home and work responsibilities which translated in the 2002 Employment Act into a right for those with children under the age of six to request flexible working arrangements from their employers.

It's this right of request that has seen flexible working arrangements, including home-based teleworking, spread to most employers in the country. And the numbers look set to grow even more with plans to extend the right to request flexibility to those with children under 16.

Going round

Some organisations still want to check home workplaces for themselves. MTM Products, a small, Chesterfield-based manufacturer of labels, nameplates and vinyl graphics, asks potential homeworkers to complete a questionnaire, which is followed by a visit from the company's safety officer. MTM's approach to flexible working gained it a place in the HSE's 2005 series of case studies of exemplary board leadership in health and safety.

This labour-intensive approach may be more feasible where the number of homeworkers is small. A study by the HSE's research agency, the Health and Safety Laboratory, into good homeworking practice (available at www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrhtm/rr262.htm) identified a "large telecommunications company with 7000 home-based workers", which initially used a competent person (usually the line manager) to visit the home and carry out a risk assessment. But this later "changed to an annual self-assessment, with the line manager checking the form, discussing the results, but no longer visiting".

Experience has shown that homeworking hazards are not generally overwhelming and fall into three categories:

• those that would be found in any office-based workplace, such as badly configured chairs
• those that are common in any office but are made worse because workers are away from the employer's control and premises, for example working without proper breaks
• those linked to the home environment, stemming from isolation, the presence of children and pets, and precisely because the home is used as a home.

The hazards in the first category are mostly physical or hardware matters, straightforward to tackle and the main focus of early homeworking arrangements. Those in the latter two categories are often a combination of psychosocial factors and insufficient "arrangements".

In tackling the resulting risks, employers should remember that their legal duties to staff are no less because they are working at home, though what is "reasonably practicable" might sometimes be harder to define. A sensible bottom line is to ensure the standards are the same at home as in the office, but not to try to reproduce the office in the home.

Fixing the physical

Some employers - and trade unions - insist that their homeworkers have a dedicated room for work. Not only does this reduce the chances of work equipment falling victim to children at play, it also makes it more likely that the homeworkers will be happy to have the correct equipment: a fully adjustable swivel chair is one thing in a workroom; it is quite another in the middle of a dining room. A separate workroom will also reduce the chances of tripping over trailing wires and allow the homeworker to separate - physically and mentally - work from home life.

Where space is more limited, foldaway, lockable offices or dividing screens may make sense - several manufacturers offer "office in a box" workstations which resemble large roll-top desks or wardrobes, which can be locked up at the end of the day. With design boundaries between office and home furnishings increasingly blurred, it should be feasible to allow the homeworker to select equipment that may not be designed for an office, but that will be ergonomically sound.

One of the major concerns in the 1990s centred on the homeworking environment - poor lighting, inadequate working and storage space, flooring that is too weak to bear heavy equipment and filing. Experience shows these pose few problems in practice: the massive increase in electronic data has reduced the need for paper storage; floors have, not surprisingly, been up to the job; and lighting is cheaply and easily remedied.

The advice on work furniture and equipment for use at home is as it would be in any location and, as such, not worth reviewing in depth here. For example, desks should be height-adjustable and chairs should be adjustable in back, height and tilt and have a secure base, usually a five-pronged star.

Laptops enjoy significant and prolonged use in homeworking and can present hazards beyond those associated with desktop computers. It is problematic to be prescriptive about this: many people like working on their laptops and are reluctant to have a large desktop computer on permanent display in their home.

But research and official guidance suggest that it is not a good idea to work all day on a laptop - the size of the keyboard and the position of the screen in relation to the eyes are not ideal - and employers should, at the least, insist on separate keyboards, screens and mice. Flat-screen technology makes the aesthetics of computers more appealing today than a decade ago. 
Remember too that homeworkers may also bring their laptops into their employers' premises: saving information on servers and using memory sticks to transport data should make this generally unnecessary but, if unavoidable, insist on bags that do not have "valuable laptop" written all over them and that can be carried with comfort (usually with two straps).

Current concern

The potential for an electrical incident as a result of homeworking is often overstated. Most homes already run the major pieces of kit for recreational use - computers and printers/faxes/scanners, as well as purely domestic items such as televisions and washing machines. Work-related equipment will not place a major extra burden on the system. In short, if there is going to be an electrical problem, it is likely to arise regardless of homeworking, although that is not an excuse for employer inaction.

That said, homes are likely to be older than offices, meaning that the wiring may be old and inadequate and electrical sockets overloaded and faulty. Though the wiring is the responsibility of the homeowner, employers should still satisfy themselves it is adequate. They should also ask for confirmation that the plugs are correctly wired and leads and cables are covered and not damaged. A multi-socket extension socket (but not a three-way plug-in adaptor) will generally be fine, if it has circuit breakers. Homeworkers should be reminded to switch off equipment at the end of the day.

Many homeworking agreements stipulate annual testing of electrical equipment. This frequency is a lucrative arrangement for testing contractors, but is more than is needed. The HSE recommends portable appliance testing (PAT) by a competent person at a frequency of between three months and five years, depending on the type and state of the equipment and how it is used. Homeworkers should, however, be shown how to carry out a basic visual check for obvious damage, which should be supplemented by a formal visual inspection by a trained person (this may be as and when a safety officer or trained manager visits a home).

Some organisations get their homeworkers who drive to bring equipment into the office every couple of years for testing; others arrange for an electrician to test in the home or ask employees to arrange for a suitably qualified person to come round.

In the second article next month, we will cover home security and working time issues and provide a checklist to issue to homeworkers for risk assessing their home workspace.

Howard Fidderman is a freelance journalist and editor of Health and Safety Bulletin. He wrote the homeworking chapter for the Institute of Director's recent book on Wellbeing at Work.