A recent court decision in Italy has drawn attention for all the right reasons, and not because it introduced anything particularly new, but because it highlights something many organisations are quietly overlooking.
The case involved a woman who was working from home and attending a virtual meeting. During the course of that meeting, she stood up to collect some documents, lost her footing and fractured her ankle, an injury that ultimately required surgery.
At first, her claim was denied on the basis that the incident had taken place in her home. On the surface, that reasoning can feel intuitive. After all, the employer does not control the home environment in the same way they control an office.
However, the court took a different view. It looked beyond the location of the incident and focused instead on the activity itself. The act of standing up to retrieve documents was considered part of her work, and on that basis, the injury was deemed work-related. Compensation was awarded accordingly.
While this may be perceived as a one-off or specific to the Italian legal system, the underlying principle is not unfamiliar from an Irish perspective. The position here is already well established under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations 2007, Chapter 5 of Part 2. Employers are required to assess and manage risks for DSE users, and that responsibility does not end at the office door. Where work is carried out at home, that environment becomes the workstation, and it must be considered from a risk management perspective.
Where many organisations begin to feel uncomfortable is not in understanding the legislation, but in how they interpret what “compliance” looks like in practice.
In most cases, employers are not doing anything obviously wrong. Virtual DSE assessments are completed, equipment is provided where required, and issues are addressed when they are raised. On paper, this appears to meet the requirement.
However, this case highlights a gap that often sits just outside that process.
The risk is not limited to the chair, the desk or the positioning of the screen. It also sits in how the work is actually carried out. Standing up, reaching for documents, moving between tasks, these are all normal parts of a working day. In many roles, they are not exceptions to the task, they are part of it.
The DSE regulations are often interpreted as being about the workstation itself, but their intent goes further. They are concerned with reducing risks to safety, health and wellbeing arising from DSE work, which includes how that workstation is used.
In a traditional office environment, this is easier to manage. The space is designed, the layout is controlled, and the conditions are relatively consistent. At home, this is rarely the case. Workstations vary significantly, space may be limited, and the way tasks are carried out can differ from one employee to another. This is where the real complexity, and the real risk, begins to emerge.
This brings the conversation to what is considered “reasonably practicable” in 2026.
Irish legislation does not expect employers to control every aspect of an employee’s home environment. What it does expect is that risks are considered in a way that reflects how work is actually being carried out. In the context of hybrid working, this moves beyond a simple tick-box exercise.
In practical terms, this means looking at the workstation as a whole, not just the individual pieces of equipment. It involves considering the surrounding environment, including space and layout, and recognising how the task flows throughout the day, including movement. It also means providing clear guidance to employees on how to work safely from home and having a process in place to identify and manage non-standard risks when they arise.
The aim is not to eliminate all risk, which would be unrealistic, but to demonstrate that the risk has been thought about, understood and managed as far as reasonably practicable.
The uncomfortable truth is that many organisations in Ireland are technically compliant, but their systems were designed for a different way of working. They are built around occasional office-based assessments, static workstations and relatively predictable environments.
That is no longer how people work.
So the more useful question is no longer whether a DSE assessment has been completed, but whether the system behind it would stand up to scrutiny if something went wrong.
If an employee were to be injured at home while carrying out a normal work activity, could the organisation demonstrate that the risk had been reasonably considered? Or would the answer fall back on, “we completed the DSE assessment”?
This case is not about the introduction of a new risk. It highlights an existing gap, the space between meeting the minimum requirements of the regulations and having a system that genuinely reflects how work is carried out today.
That is where the real exposure lies.
For organisations beginning to recognise these gaps, the most useful step is often to pause and take a broader view of how DSE is being managed overall. Not to overhaul everything, but to understand whether the current approach still reflects how work is actually being carried out across the organisation. In many cases, a simple review of the system, how assessments are completed, how decisions are made, and how risks are identified and escalated, can bring a level of clarity that day-to-day activity does not. It allows organisations to move forward with more confidence, knowing that their approach is not only compliant on paper, but robust in practice.