Eight DSE mistakes small businesses make

These come up again and again in small businesses. None of them is unusual, and all of them are cheap to fix once you have noticed.

1. Assuming the rules are for bigger companies

There is no small business exemption in the DSE regulations. No headcount threshold, no lighter touch regime. A business with four employees carries the same duties as one with four thousand.

2. Assessing the office and ignoring the kitchen table

The regulations follow the work, not the building. If someone does two days a week at home, that setup needs assessing too, and it is usually the worse of the two.

3. Treating the assessment as the deliverable

The assessment is not the compliance. Acting on it is. A folder full of completed assessments with no corresponding actions is a liability rather than a defence.

4. Keeping no usable record

Assessments returned by email, scattered across inboxes, unretrievable eighteen months later. If you cannot produce a named person’s assessment quickly, you effectively do not have one.

5. Doing it once

People change desks, move to home working, get new equipment and develop conditions. A three-year-old assessment describes a workstation that may no longer exist.

6. Missing the people without desks

Field engineers, drivers, site managers and anyone who writes up on a laptop in a van or a hotel room. They are frequently DSE users, they are almost always missed, and their setups are usually the worst in the business.

7. Skipping the software and work organisation questions

Schedule 1 covers software suitability and system response speed, and regulation 4 covers how work is planned. These are in scope, and they are often where the real risk sits in machine-paced roles like support queues and data entry.

8. Never telling people what they are entitled to

Regulation 7 requires you to inform users about eye tests and breaks. Nobody asking for an eye test is not evidence that nobody needs one. It is usually evidence that nobody knows they can.

Fixing all eight in a week

1. 1Write the user list, including home and field workers.
2. 2Send an assessment that covers all of Schedule 1, including software and work pattern.
3. 3Sort the findings by severity, fix the high ones, and date each action.
4. 4Put the assessments and the action log somewhere retrievable.
5. 5Send a short note telling people about eye tests and breaks.
6. 6Diarise the next round.