DSE Without a Desk: 7 Questions for Hot Desking and Hybrid Teams
The display screen equipment assessment your organisation runs was almost certainly designed for a world where everyone had a desk. One person, one chair, one screen, one form, filed.
That world has gone in most professional and technology organisations. People book a bench in the morning, work from home on Thursdays, spend two days at a client site, and use a coworking floor when they are in another city. The duty has not changed. The thing it attaches to has moved.
This is not a guide to what DSE assessment is or what the law requires in outline, both of which are well covered elsewhere on this blog. It is about the operational problem: running a defensible programme for a population with no fixed workstations.
Seven questions.
1. Does hot desking reduce the obligation or multiply it?
It multiplies it, and the reason is in the wording.
Regulation 2 of the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992 requires the employer to perform a suitable and sufficient analysis of workstations in order to assess the risks to the persons using them. The duty attaches to users and to the workstations they use, not to a desk allocated on an HR system.
So an organisation where two hundred people rotate across one hundred and twenty positions has not halved its assessment population. It has created a situation where each user encounters multiple setups, and where no individual owns the condition of any of them. HSE's guidance on display screen equipment and the supporting publication L26 set out what the analysis covers.
2. What are you actually assessing when the desk changes daily?
The practical answer is setup types rather than individual desks.
Most flexible floors contain a small number of configurations: a standard bench position with a single monitor, a dual-screen position, a soft seating area, a quiet booth, a standing station, a meeting room used as a workspace. Assess each configuration once, properly, and you have addressed the environment.
What remains individual is the fit between the person and the configuration, which is where the user assessment does its work: whether the chair adjusts to them, whether the monitor reaches the right height, whether they can reach the keyboard without extending.
The failure mode is assessing neither. An organisation with a generic form issued to individuals and no assessment of the configurations themselves has documented opinions rather than an analysis.
3. Does the equipment follow the person or the desk?
Need Expert H&S Guidance?
Our qualified consultants can help you implement the right health & safety measures for your business.
The single most useful decision an organisation makes here, and it is a procurement decision rather than a compliance one.
Equipment fixed to desks works only if every desk is equipped identically, which is rarely true and becomes untrue quickly as things break and are not replaced. Equipment issued to the person, carried in a bag or stored in a locker, travels with them to the bench, the home office and the client site.
A laptop riser, a separate keyboard and mouse, and where appropriate a docking station, issued to the individual, resolve more DSE risk than any form. The assessment identifies what is needed. Provision is what changes the outcome, and organisations that do the first without the second have generated evidence of a problem they did not fix.
4. Who checks the shared kit?
The gap nobody owns on a flexible floor.
Monitor arms drift out of position, chairs lose gas lift, cables disappear, and a station that was correct at fit-out is not correct eighteen months later. When a desk belongs to somebody, that person reports it. When it belongs to nobody, everybody works around it.
Two controls address this and neither is expensive: a periodic physical check of positions as part of your normal workplace inspection, and a reporting route people actually use when a station is not usable, with a service level attached. The second only works if fixing things happens visibly, because a route that produces nothing stops being used within a month.
5. What covers the days people are not in the office?
Hybrid means the duty splits rather than reduces.
HSE's guidance on home working and DSE addresses the position where people work at home habitually. A person in the office three days and at home two has two settings, and the home one is the one nobody has seen.
The workable approach is a self-assessment with real provision behind it and a route to escalate, which is the same approach that works for fully remote staff. Where people are employed through an employer of record or engaged in countries where you have no entity, the same logic applies and the local requirements may be more prescriptive than the British position.
6. What about days at client sites and coworking floors?
The two settings your assessment almost certainly ignores.
A person working three days a week at a client's office is using that client's workstations. Concurrent duties apply: the host has obligations towards people affected by its undertaking, and your duty to your own employee is unaffected by the address. In practice the answer is usually equipment that travels with the person plus an understanding with the host, agreed at the start of the arrangement rather than after a complaint.
Coworking and serviced floors raise the same question with a different counterparty. The operator provides the furniture and does not know your people, and the split of responsibilities is worth establishing in writing.
7. Are breaks designed in, or assumed?
The requirement that survives every change in where people sit, and the one most often forgotten in an assessment focused on furniture.
Regulation 4 requires the employer to plan activities so that daily work at a display screen is periodically interrupted by breaks or changes of activity. HSE's guidance on the daily work routine explains the principle: short frequent interruptions are better than occasional long ones.
Flexible working has made this harder rather than easier. Back-to-back video calls, taken from the same position, with no walk between meeting rooms, produce longer uninterrupted screen periods than an office day ever did. That is a scheduling and culture question rather than a furniture one, and it belongs in the assessment because the regulation puts it there.
Running the programme
| Element | Fixed-desk approach | What works without assigned desks | |---|---|---| | Environment | Assess each desk | Assess each setup configuration | | Individual | One form, filed once | Assess the fit between person and configuration | | Equipment | Fitted to desks | Issued to the person, travels with them | | Maintenance | Occupant reports faults | Periodic checks plus a reporting route that works | | Home days | Out of scope | Self-assessment with provision and escalation | | Client and coworking | Not considered | Equipment travels, split agreed in advance | | Breaks | Assumed | Planned, with call scheduling considered | | Records | Form per employee | Who was assessed, what was provided, when reviewed |
The last row is what makes the programme defensible. A form completed two years ago by someone who has since changed role, location and equipment evidences an event rather than an arrangement, which is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone. Periodic health and safety audits then confirm the provision matches the assessment.
For international groups
DSE is one of the areas where national requirements diverge more than most people expect, and where a group standard is least likely to transfer intact.
Germany places display screen requirements within its workplace ordinance rather than in a standalone instrument, so a British-format assessment does not map onto what an inspector expects. Mexico applies a dedicated standard to telework, requiring an equipment list per person and a periodic verification checklist of conditions at the place the work is done. Denmark requires homeworking to be covered within its statutory workplace assessment. Several jurisdictions attach specific entitlements around eye and eyesight testing.
A group approach that assesses to one national standard and translates will be adequate in some entities and incomplete in others.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite builds DSE programmes for organisations whose people move, which now describes most professional and technology employers. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with IT and software, finance and banking and legal organisations, and our approach to DSE assessment is built around provision rather than paperwork.
Where teams span several countries, our global health and safety consultants confirm what each jurisdiction requires of the assessment and the record, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current as working patterns change.
If your DSE assessments were designed for assigned desks and your people no longer have any, a free gap analysis will show you what the programme is missing.
Related Articles
Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
