Display Screen Equipment (DSE)

If your team spends most of their day in front of a screen, you're legally required to assess their workstations. Our health and safety experts carry out DSE assessments for UK businesses, helping you protect your employees, meet the regulations and reduce the risk of discomfort, musculoskeletal disorders and associated absence or claims.

Jump to:

• What is DSE?
• Do I need a DSE assessment?
• How we help with DSE
• What a DSE assessment covers
• DSE for remote and hybrid workers
• DSE self-assessment
• DSE regulations explained
• FAQs

• Get in touch

   

What is DSE?

DSE stands for Display Screen Equipment. In plain terms, it's any device with a screen that your staff use to do their work, including laptops, computers, tablets and other display screen equipment used as part of a workstation.

Employees who use display screen equipment habitually and as a significant part of their normal work are generally regarded as DSE users under the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992. Once you've got DSE users, those regulations apply to your business.

That means it's your job as an employer to make sure their workstations are set up properly, the risks of long-term screen use are managed, and the right paperwork is in place to prove it.

Do I need a DSE assessment?

Employers must assess workstations used by employees who meet the definition of a DSE user. And the rule is broader than people often think.

You'll need a DSE assessment if your staff:

• Sit at a fixed workstation in your office
• Work from home, full-time or hybrid
• Hot-desk between different setups
• Move between sites with a laptop
• Use a screen habitually and as a significant part of their normal work

The legal duty doesn't disappear just because someone works from their kitchen table. Employers should assess and manage DSE risks for homeworkers and provide appropriate support, guidance and equipment where required.

DSE assessments also need to be kept up to date. The assessment should be reviewed where there has been a significant change to the workstation, the work undertaken, or where issues are identified.

Not sure where your business stands? Get in touch and we'll talk it through.

How we help with DSE

Sorting out DSE properly can be a bigger job than people expect, especially with hybrid teams spread across home and office setups. Our health and safety experts can take it off your hands.

We come and look at how your team actually works, then put together DSE assessments that fit. We don't rely on tick-box paperwork or off-the-shelf templates, and what you get is a clear, jargon-free report your business can actually use, with practical recommendations that make sense for your setup.

As well as the assessments themselves, our team can help with:

• Face-to-face workstation assessments for office-based staff
• Remote DSE assessments for home and hybrid workers
• Reviews of existing assessments to spot what's been missed
• Recommendations on chairs, monitors, keyboards and other equipment
• Setting up a DSE self-assessment process for your staff to complete periodically
• Advice on workstation adjustments for employees with specific needs, including pregnancy, musculoskeletal conditions and other individual requirements
• Ongoing reviews so your DSE assessments stay current as your team changes

Let our team take care of your DSE compliance, so you can focus on running your business.

What a DSE assessment covers

A proper DSE assessment isn't just about ticking off whether someone has a chair. It looks at every element of how a person works with their screen, and how that setup affects them over the course of a working day.

When our team carries out a DSE assessment, here's what we check:

• Posture. How the person is sitting, where the strain points are, and what good posture looks like for their specific setup.
• Chair. Height, lumbar support, armrest position, whether it's adjustable enough for the person using it.
• Display screen. Position, height, distance, brightness, contrast and glare.
• Keyboard and mouse. Whether they're positioned in a way that keeps wrists and arms in a neutral position.
• Desk. Height, available space, cable management, and whether there's enough room to work properly.
• Eyesight. Whether the screen text is comfortable to read, and whether the person needs to be referred for an eye test.
• Environment. Lighting, heating, ventilation, noise and access to the workstation.
• Laptops and mobile working. Whether the right accessories (docking stations, separate keyboards, monitor risers) are in place.

We also give your team advice on how to spot problems early, before they turn into longer-term discomfort or musculoskeletal problems that can lead to absence.

Want us to assess your workstations? Get in touch

DSE for remote and hybrid workers

Since 2020, the way UK businesses use DSE has changed completely. A lot of the workstations your team uses now aren't in your office, they're in spare bedrooms, kitchens and at hot desks in shared spaces.

The law hasn't changed. If your employees work from home, even part of the week, you're still responsible for making sure their DSE setup is safe.

That doesn't mean visiting every employee's house. It usually means:

• A DSE self-assessment your remote workers complete at home, reviewed by a competent person
• Clear guidance on what a safe home workstation looks like
• A process for flagging problems and getting them sorted (additional equipment, advice, in-person follow-up if needed)
• Documented reviews so you can show you've taken your duty seriously if anything goes wrong

We help businesses set up a remote DSE process that's practical to run, not one that buries your HR team in paperwork.

DSE self-assessment

For many businesses, the right approach is a hybrid one. Staff fill in a DSE self-assessment about their own setup, and a competent person reviews the results to flag anything that needs follow-up.

Done well, self-assessment saves time and works for distributed teams. Done badly, it becomes a tick-box exercise that doesn't catch real problems.

We can help you:

• Set up a DSE self-assessment process that fits the way your business operates
• Train someone in-house to review and act on the results
• Step in to handle the reviews ourselves if you'd rather outsource it

• Follow up with face-to-face assessments where the self-assessment flags something serious

   

DSE regulations explained

The law on DSE in the UK is the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992. Despite the name, the regulations have been kept current and apply just as much to today's hybrid and remote setups as they did to the office computers of the early 90s.

In plain terms, the regulations require employers to:

• Identify who in the business is a DSE user
• Assess each DSE user's workstation and reduce the risks
• Make sure workstations meet the minimum requirements set out in the regulations
• Plan work so DSE users get breaks or changes of activity
• Provide information and training on safe DSE use
• Provide eye and eyesight tests on request for DSE users and, where required solely for DSE work, contribute towards the cost of special corrective appliances
• Reassess workstations when something changes

The HSE enforces these regulations, and breaches can lead to improvement notices, prohibition notices and (in serious cases) prosecution. The most common consequence, though, is something less dramatic but more expensive: musculoskeletal injury claims from employees whose workstations weren't set up properly.