UK companies are to be given free access to mobile inspection app and digital platform, iAuditor, from SafetyCulture, to help manage the working from home concerns of employers and employees during the Coronavirus crisis.
The offer is aimed at HR teams, who have found it difficult to conduct risk assessments, quickly and at scale, following rapid changes to working arrangements brought about by the government’s ‘Stay at Home’ order.
Quick and easy to set up, iAuditor allows staff to complete their own home office inspections in minutes. Employees simply need to download the app through the iPhone App Store or Google Play store.
HR teams should need just 30 minutes to set up a range of inspection checklists and surveys on the management platform – where they can access a public library of more than 100,000 templates. These include templates sanctioned by CIPD, WHO, CDC and many other leading authorities. There are more than a dozen editable templates specific to Coronavirus, including several home working checklists. Companies can also create their own templates for any range of purposes.
The platform also includes an analytics dashboard that visualises the inspection data from employees, allowing HR managers and directors to identify the common challenges employees might be facing. This ability to identify patterns will help companies to prioritise their response to any inspection findings.
While home working has been a growing trend in recent years, just 5.3%* of workers regularly use their home as their main place of work. These sudden changes have now raised questions around working conditions, hygiene and mental wellbeing – as so many more people try to balance their work and home life. Many staff are also trying to complete work commitments in properties shared with vulnerable people or children who would usually be in school.
This has resulted in HR teams being asked to answer a wide range of questions, including, whether people could develop back pain from poor seating arrangements, how staff can fit work around the home schooling needs of their children, and whether people stuck at home might work too much – especially when companies are still required to comply with Working Time Regulations.
These considerations are placing a huge strain on HR directors who are responsible for managing their employers’ duty of care to their workforce. To relieve the stress of this situation, however, companies will now have free access to SafetyCulture’s iAuditor digital tools and platform for an initial period of three months, for unlimited users.
Dan Joyce, General Manager for EMEA at SafetyCulture, said: “The reality we face is that lots of people are working at home, possibly for a prolonged period of time – and very few were prepared for this scenario. Most companies will have had people working from home occasionally, but less than a third of people (29.6%*) have done this in the past 12 months and just one in twenty do it on a regular basis.
Dan added: “This has thrown up questions that need answering, and it is adding strain to what is already a stressful situation. SafetyCulture is built around providing tools to ensure worker safety. With the unprecedented shift to home working, our products are perfectly placed to ensure the safe work practices of home based workers. Free access to SafetyCulture’s iAuditor will not just relieve the pressure on HR teams, it will also help to remove the enormous administrative burden that this crisis has created.”
SafetyCulture’s iAuditor has already been made freely available for an extended period to healthcare, emergency, education and volunteer organisations.
Please find details of the iAuditor offer here.