Had a WFH* injury that wasn’t your fault?

* That’s working from home, as f irms face f lood of compensation cases

EMPLOYERS face an avalanche of legal claims by staff who have suffered injuries while working from home, a UK expert in employee wellbeing has warned.

Thousands of workers have been ordered to stay away from their offices to help curb the spread of coronavirus.

Instead, they have been carrying on with their normal duties from improvised workstations in kitchens, attics, conservatories, living rooms and spare bedrooms.

But Wendy Chalmers Mill, the managing director of Stirling-based Positive Performance, said firms which have failed to conduct proper risk assessments of their staff’s home working conditions could be forced to pay out millions of pounds in compensation. A survey by the Institute for Employment Studies during the first national lockdown showed a sharp rise in workers suffering from musculoskeletal complaints.

Compared with their normal physical condition, 58 per cent reported suffering increased neck pain, while 56 per cent said they had experienced shoulder pain and 55 per cent had backache.

Ms Chalmers Mill, who has delivered workplace safety training programmes to some of the UK’s biggest employers, said: ‘Regulations that date back to the 1980s and 1990s about working with a display screen still apply when you are working from home. They state that any employer with more than five staff must ensure they are trained in how to use their equipment, how to sit and to ensure that they are working in a safe way.

‘Any time workers relocate into a new workstation, by law they are meant to have another risk assessment. Many employers do not realise there is potential litigation for being non-compliant.’ Ms Chalmers Mill said there was an ‘avalanche’ of cases in the 1980s and 1990s, when workers who had contracted upper-limb pain syndrome and repetitive strain injury took their employers to court.

She added: ‘We could see a resurgence of that because so many employers are not aware of the risks of working with a laptop in unregulated conditions.’

The mother of three, whose company runs remote workplace safety courses for staff teams of all sizes, said some firms believe they are covered because they have sent out checklists for home workers.

She said: ‘If an employee hasn’t been trained on how to use the equipment they are using, then how they fill in the checklist might be problematic.

‘Some will just check it for the sake of checking it, not necessarily because they think there’s a potential for injury.’ According to Ms Chalmers Mill, some of the most painful and long-lasting injuries are caused by continued, improper use of laptops.

She said: ‘Laptops were designed to transport information from one

‘Laptops aren’t designed to spend hours on’

place to another and do brief, short spells on. They were not designed to spend hours and hours on.’

She also believes people working at home overwork for fear of being suspected of slacking by bosses, and so will spend longer at their screen than in the office.

She said: ‘Because you’re not in an office, multi-tasking, getting up to talk to someone, going to the coffee machine, you may spend longer sitting down than you would do in an office where there are different stimuli.’