micro volunteering - risk assessments
Someone asked the question about risk assessments and health and safety for volunteering from home, so I thought I would have a go at answering it.
The very short answer is that there is no comprehensive answer to this, of course as decent people we feel some kind of moral obligation to ensure the safety of people we engage with whether paid or volunteering.
The more complex answer is that it depends on the nature of your organisation and the work that you do, and what expectations your organisation as well as any external stakeholders may have.
Certainly as a line manager of people paid staff working from home one of the expectations of me was that I would carry out a health and safety assessment each year. What comfort our insurers got from that I cannot guess, of course as soon as I left his house he could have moved things around and had trailing wires everywhere and I would have been none the wiser - BUT the organisaitons back was covered.
And that is of course the cynical point about risk assessments and health and safety and insurance.
One responsibility of the volunteer co-ordinator/manager is to protect the organisation and there are certainly steps you can take to ensure that this is done. You can have a checklist of what a safe working environment is, and ask the volunteer to send you a filled in copy, you can have handouts giving advice for example about the length of time looking at a computer screen, how often to take breaks and move around, anything that may be a health and safety risk and how that risk can be minimised. You can make sure that the volunteer has read and understood that information and get a signature from them confirming that, keep it on file and update it yearly.
That should satisfy your organisation's insurers, and hopefully would be able to be done quite easily with the help of several others from within your organisation.
Hope that is helpful.
This has always been an awkward area for me when promoting micro volunteering opps (MVOs). In the early days, high street volunteer centres just didn't want to know about micro volunteering - the question of h + s policies, risk assessments et al was something they were not familiar with re: MVOs or they just didn't have guidelines in place to advise them how to embrace MVOs.
These days, I'm finding more and more VCs are embracing MVOs perhaps because discussion about this new-ish form of volunteering is more widespread. They seem less readily to ask questions about risk assesments etc, which to me is encouraging and perhaps signifies a willingness to embrace MVOs on the basis of more flexibility with their interpretation of policies that cover home based MVOs.
Volunteering from home is quite a difficult area to police from a risk assesment point of view and IMHO, the proposal that Debbieu is suggesting is certainly a practical one and one that I would advocate.
The T + Cs on Help From Home place the emphasis on the individual to monitor their own volunteering environment. I'm not sure how else this could be done.
That said, do any volunteer centres or insurers for that matter (if any are lurking around) have an opinion on this issue?