Office-Based Risk Management

Office based risk management is no less important than in working environments with heavy machinery and more seemingly serious risks.

Whether your office is a small co-working space or a large corporate office, it will share standard key features with other offices. To identify the risks most relevant to your working space, you need to carry out a site-specific risk assessment.

Identify Potential Hazards in an Office Environment

Think large scale when you’re assessing your office building, and then you can get to the finer details of risk management within individual work stations. The hazards you’ve identified in the building as part of your office risk assessment will potentially be more general — risks like fire, slips and trips, and even the presence of asbestos.

Generally, risk management for offices will be particularly focused on ergonomics. Paper storage, sound levels, lighting, fire safety, and poorly designed workstations will affect staff productivity and may ultimately affect their mental and physical health. Display screen equipment and surrounding areas pose a hazard, so assess the details of this setup — screen positioning, type of keyboard, chair/ standing desk requirements. The risk may vary between staff members, so include them in your risk assessment to gauge their specific needs.

Remember to do a full walkthrough of any stockroom and kitchen areas too. Risks extend beyond workstation areas. You’ll need to assess anywhere staff are required to go.

Who Might Be Harmed, and How?

Consider who will realistically be coming through your office and build your risk management around that. Is it solely staff? Or do you have visitors or clients that also visit the office? It may be that deliveries are brought into the office if you don’t have a separate reception area. It can be useful to consult your visitor sign-in sheet to see who is coming through your doors.

A significant hazard will be ergonomics, so be sure to detail exactly how this could affect your staff. For example, if the hazard is display screen equipment, consider the effects on your staff, including posture problems, pain and discomfort in their joints and headaches. Make sure your risk management includes cables and computer wires as potential hazards. Consider the increased risk of electrical equipment when hot drinks are around a desk and remember to assess their risk in a kitchen area separately.

Stress is a potential hazard for your staff, especially if there is a risk of excessive lone working. Consider the effects of this on staff members and ways you can minimise the risk. Stress can be caused by any number of factors in an office environment: not knowing the job, unmanageable workload, bullying etc. Make sure you’re pre-empting these work related stress risks, have robust processes in place to address them, and are effectively communicating these processes to your staff.

Ways You’re Currently Controlling the Risks

Training is an effective way to communicate and demonstrate control methods of the risks that could be encountered in an office environment. For good office ergonomics consider this guide to working with display screen equipment (DSE), and make sure that compliance is part of your staff training. Frequent reminders about the correct usage of equipment and standards for an optimised workstation will reduce the risk of work-related injuries and can, in some instances, improve efficiency.

If manual lifting of materials and equipment will take place in the office, manual handling training is a good example of a way to communicate, manage and reduce the risks associated with receiving deliveries and lifting or moving heavy boxes and other equipment.

Further Action Required to Control Risks

Like any risk assessment process, you should prioritise matters of high risk. If no fire assembly points have been identified, allocated and communicated you may wish to deal with this item first. If your office risk assessment identifies issues such as filing being at an unsuitable height, or storage not being fully accessible, you may need a more long term plan to resolve these issues.

Some actions will be ongoing, so these need to be constantly monitored and updated, for example, checking plugs and electrical equipment on a regular basis for damage or faults. In most cases issues associated with portable electrical equipment will be identified during your Portable Appliance Testing Regime (PAT), however it is always beneficial to have some lower level secondary checks being completed.

Who Is Responsible for Carrying Out the Actions?

The hazards you highlight in your office risk assessment will, in some cases, be specific to individual staff member’s needs. It’s important the team know their role in complying with the standards they’ve trained in, and also the protocol for reporting risks.

For risks that affect staff health and wellbeing, e.g. stress and muscle strains, your team must know who they should flag these with. You can take measures to prevent these risks, such as ensuring staff take breaks away from their screen, and optimising their work stations for individual needs. But you should also remind staff they can speak confidentially to their manager if they’re feeling unwell or uncomfortable. It’s the manager’s responsibility to encourage open conversation about these threats to staff health and wellbeing, and stay on top of monitoring them to help eliminate these risks.

Deadlines for Your Risk Management

Set realistic deadlines for the actions for your risk management, taking into consideration outside factors like ordering new equipment. If your team members are responsible for actions specific to their own workstation, make sure they know when they need to make adjustments by. If you have delegated some actions to other staff members, it’s your responsibility to check their progress until the completion. You should schedule a review to get an update on progress for an individual’s workstation or any other responsibilities specific to that individual.