Creating a Covid secure workplace – how should we prepare?

As we transition through the final stage of the Coronavirus roadmap, we know that a number of you will be starting to think about returning to work and how you prepare your business for inviting employees back into the workplace.

We’ve highlighted the core areas you will want to consider when preparing:

Covid-19 Risk Assessment 

The first step towards returning employees to the workplace is ensuring your building or premise is prepared.

The initial steps you can do towards achieving this is, carrying out a risk assessment, ensuring you consult your employees throughout this process.

When conducting your risk assessment, you will need to cover the following core areas:

• Identify what work activity and situations might cause transmission;
• Consider which employees are high risk (those vulnerable to those living with vulnerable people); and
• Review how likely it is that someone could be exposed.

Your risk assessment can be used as a central document that can be updated to reflect any legislation changes.

 

Cleaning Requirements

This would be the perfect opportunity to review your current cleaning regimes and depending on the nature of your business, you may want to consider conducting a deep clean before opening and on a regular basis.

Other cleaning requirements you may want to consider are, ensuring phones and keyboards are wiped daily with a anti-viral cleaner, providing additional PPE including masks or anti-viral hand gel.

If you would like employees to wear gloves or masks, you will need to ensure there is training and briefing around the correct usage.

Social Distancing

Implementing social distancing within the workplace will help reduce the day-to-day contact with other people as much as possible.

To achieve social distancing within the workplace, you may want to think about redesigning the workspaces to enable 2 metre spacing. Alternatively, you can look at staggering start times, creating one way walk-throughs or changing seating layouts. If it is not possible to keep the 2 metre spacing, you can look at implementing perspex desk shields, encourage employees to not work facing each other and think about reducing the capacity of employees who are in the building (e.g shift patterns).

Employees 

Once you are comfortable that the building or premise has been assessed and any additional requirements that are needed to safeguard your employees have been implemented, the next step is to consider your employees.

You will need to think about how your employees return to work, creating a plan about who will return and when. Each company is different, however there are a number of things to help you formulate a plan that works best for your employees and the business.

Whichever plan your business decides to take, it is important that this is well documented and communicated to all employees to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Hygiene

Aside from conducting an initial deep clean and regular cleaning of the building, there are other ways in which you can manage hygiene in-house:

•       Distributing and placing sprays and wipes in prominent areas of the business such as: entrances, exits and kitchens;
•       Utilising low-touch or no-touch doors, switches and other fittings;
•       Removing shared tools and equipment, ensuring each employee has their own things to use; and
•       Implementing a clean desk policy.

Return to work with our expert support

If you are looking for support with returning your employees to work, you are not alone and our HR experts are on hand to support you. We can help you create a Covid secure workplace environment by supporting you with; carrying out a Covid risk assessment, guiding you through the preparations and providing you with policies and guidelines that are in line with the latest government legislations.

Ready to get back to business? Book a consultation call with one of our experts today: [email protected] / 01932 485 325