DSE Assessments: The Hybrid-Working Blind Spot Catching Employers Out

When millions of workers moved to home and hybrid working, their desks went with them. The legal duty to make sure those desks are safe did not disappear — it followed the worker home. Yet most employers’ display screen equipment (DSE) compliance is still built around a building half the workforce no longer sits in full-time.

This isn’t a new regulation or a sudden crackdown. The rules have been in place for decades. What’s changed is where people work — and that shift has quietly opened a gap in a lot of otherwise well-run businesses.

The rules aren’t new — but who they cover has expanded

DSE duties come from the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992. They apply to anyone who is a “DSE user” — broadly, someone who uses a screen daily, for continuous or near-continuous periods of around an hour or more, as a significant part of their normal work. Most office workers, developers, finance and customer-service staff fall comfortably inside that definition.

Where someone is a DSE user, the employer must assess their workstation, reduce any risks identified, provide eye tests on request, and give appropriate training. None of that is optional, and breach is enforceable by the HSE.

The detail employers miss is this: the definition is about the person and how they work, not the building they happen to be in.

Home and hybrid workers are covered too

The Regulations apply to workers who work from home on a permanent or long-term basis, and to hybrid workers who routinely split their time between the workplace and home. The duty doesn’t transfer to the employee just because the workstation has moved into their spare room or onto their kitchen table — it stays with the employer.

There is a sensible limit. The Regulations don’t bite for people who use DSE only occasionally, or for short, one-off periods at home. For genuinely temporary arrangements, practical advice and good-practice guidance is a proportionate response. But for anyone working from home regularly as part of how their job now runs, the full assessment duty applies.

The hybrid catch: two workstations, not one

Here’s the part that trips businesses up most. A hybrid worker has two workstations — and two different risk profiles. Someone with a properly set-up, height-adjustable desk in the office may be working from a dining chair and a laptop on a soft sofa two days a week. An assessment that only covers the office tells you nothing about where the injury is most likely to come from.

Where a worker uses DSE both at home and in the office, the assessment needs to cover both situations. One assessment, one location, is no longer enough for a hybrid workforce.

The real failure: the checklist that sits in a folder

You don’t usually need to visit someone’s home to assess it. A self-assessment completed by the worker is a perfectly valid method — provided they’ve been given suitable training and a proper checklist to work from.

But a completed self-assessment is not, by itself, a finished assessment. The returns have to be reviewed by a competent person, the red flags have to be acted on, and anyone who never submitted has to be chased. This is where most home-working DSE programmes quietly fail: checklists go out, some come back, they accumulate on a shared drive, and nobody closes the loop. A folder full of completed forms is documentation. It is not compliance.

Two practical points worth remembering:

• The employer pays. Where an assessment shows a worker needs equipment — a separate monitor, a keyboard, a suitable chair — the worker cannot be charged for it, wherever they work.

• You must record the findings if you have five or more employees. Keep it simple and focused on the controls and actions, but keep it.

 

What’s actually changed is the scale

The reason this matters more now than it did a decade ago is sheer volume. With a large share of the workforce now working from home at least part of the week, the home workstation has gone from an edge case to a mainstream compliance requirement.

The risk it manages is real, not theoretical. Musculoskeletal disorders — back, neck and shoulder problems — remain one of the largest causes of work-related ill health in Great Britain, accounting for hundreds of thousands of cases and millions of lost working days each year. When a worker brings a civil claim for an injury they link to their workstation, the presence or absence of a proper, acted-upon assessment is exactly what the case turns on. An employer who assessed and acted is in a defensible position. An employer with a blank space where the home-working assessments should be is not.

What to do now

1. Identify every DSE user — including hybrid, home-based, contract and agency workers using your equipment. Use the habitual-use test, not a list of job titles.

2. Issue a proper self-assessment with training on how to complete it, covering the home workstation (and the office one, for hybrid staff).

3. Have a competent person review the returns, follow up on anything flagged, and act on it.

4. Fund any equipment the assessment identifies as needed.

5. Record the significant findings if you employ five or more people, and reassess when something changes — a house move, new equipment, or a worker reporting discomfort.

 

Close the gap before it costs you

Hybrid working is settled, not temporary — and DSE compliance needs to reflect that. If your assessments still assume everyone is at an office desk five days a week, you have a gap that’s easy to close now and expensive to ignore.

Talk to Office Test about DSE assessments for your office, home and hybrid workers. We’ll help you set up a process that holds up, wherever your people are working.