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Coronavirus lockout restrictions are being lifted throughout the nation, and businesses can reopen by the government. Employers are responsible for updating their business practices and introducing steps to ensure that staff, clients and tourists can return to work as safely as possible.
In this blog, we will outline the main concepts that employers must consider in various industries to ensure that their companies can reopen safely and limit COVID transmission risks to workers, consumers, and tourists. These principles refer to the guidelines of the UK government but provide equally valuable guidance for companies worldwide.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many firms were forced to close their premises or alter their work. But read our advice for life after lockdown and reopening a company with constraints being progressively removed.
Table of Contents
How to prepare for your business premises to reopen
Now let’s dive deeper into how to prepare your business premises for reopening.
1. Reorganise for social distancing
With the assumption that social distancing policies will stay in place, retail companies and shops need to explore ways to reduce the number of customers at their premises by:
- Introducing slots for appointments
- Increasing the space between clients
- To handle possible queues and use outside premises were available and safe, painting or sticking markers on the floor
- In public places, use a one-way scheme
- Encourage clients, whenever possible, to shop alone
- Inform customers via signage and verbal reminders of guidelines
- Install glass screens between clients and workers at tills
You may offer to sell face masks and coverings so that various types of security could be purchased by those caught unaware. It could be an additional source of revenue and protect both the workers and customers.
For your staff, you might want to consider adjusting working hours. It could contribute to the need for extended operating hours to meet the demand as fewer customers are permitted at one time on the premises.
We’ve seen stores opening an hour earlier to help support demand for key jobs. Changing work hours may give office employees more flexibility to accommodate the availability of staff around childcare or illness.
The method should continue to be supported and welcomed by businesses who have relocated their services online as a choice to reduce physical contact. Look whenever possible to discourage face-to-face meetings in an office environment and continue to use virtual calls. To hold office staff 2 m apart, you should consider using floor tape to mark areas. Install screens to isolate staff if it’s not possible to switch workstations apart.
2. Cleaning & hygiene practices
Businesses can play a major role as lockdown eases in preventing the spread or second wave of the virus. To keep clients and employers safe, you should consider developing cleaning, handwashing and hygiene procedures. You can carry out the following to ensure a safe environment:
- Increasing the cleaning frequency of both jobs and public spaces with a strong emphasis on high-touch areas such as handrails and door handles
- Providing hand sanitiser and disposable tissues in the workplace or on shop floors
- Customer sanitising services such as tills, card machines
- Encourage staff to carry mugs, cutlery and plates of their own.
- Avoid hotdesking and share facilities, clean workstations between different occupants where this is not necessary.
Besides, companies can aim to minimise touchpoints by facilitating hands-free transactions wherever possible through contactless payment.
Consider replacing touchscreens with paper procedures, such as those used by individuals checking in for appointments. Touchscreens should be sanitised between uses if this is unavoidable, and consumers should have access to the hand sanitiser before usage. Providing protective gloves for consumers to use is another option.
3. Communication plan to reopen
It’s crucial to connect with your staff, clients, and suppliers when reopening a company to prepare them for the change.
Talk to your employees & gain feedback
For staff who have been furloughed or working from home, they may be desperate to get back to work or maybe understandably concerned about returning. To help reassure workers, understand the challenges ahead and foster an open culture to discuss their problems.
Understanding the challenges can help you find areas you may have overlooked, and open communication can assist workers with their mental health. Your business should highlight the measures and processes to help them function while distancing themselves from society.
Share new ways of working with customers
It is also really crucial to connect with your clients. Let your clients know that you are re-opening, noting any updates to opening hours and work practices. Be transparent about the steps you have put in place for hygiene and cleaning to demonstrate how you keep them safe and that they know what to expect.
You can use digital platforms, such as social media, blogs, email newsletters, and on-site signage, to convey these improvements.
Work with suppliers
Let them know you’re reopening a company with suppliers and decide whether they’re willing to supply. To keep everybody secure and ask them to share the measures they are using, explain the measures and procedures you have implemented around deliveries.
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Government advice on reopening a business
It is important to track the government advice and follow their guidelines on working safely during coronavirus as you begin preparing for life after lockdown as the situation continues to develop. Remember to put up posters to say that COVID-19 Secure is your business.
1. Managing risk
Some key ways you can handle risks in any workplace are below:
- Ensure that someone engaged in your company who feels unwell stays at home
- Hand-washing improved
- Encourage working whenever possible from home
- Ensure recommendations for social distancing are followed. That is 2, or 1 m with risk reduction if 2 m is not feasible
- Reducing cycles of activity
- Increased cleansing of surfaces
- Using screens and obstacles
- Avoiding operating face-to-face
- Using set teams or sponsorship
- Delete needless socially distanced behaviours that can not be carried out
- Holding voices down, such as refraining from playing music
2. Communication
To reopen your business successfully, your employees must be heavily involved in this process. A consultation will ensure that the modifications are approved to clarify the steps you plan to adopt and hear feedback and improve adjustment.
You will build the best chances of reopening in a way that helps everyone to function safely and feel secure with the changes with everyone’s participation.
3. Working from home
People are always encouraged to work from home wherever possible, and you should accept and support this whenever feasible. Working from home will include supplying the appropriate equipment to work efficiently with remotely working team members and implementing a simple sharing network to track and manage work online.
Making your business ‘COVID secure’
You will need to improve the workplace to make it ‘COVID-secure’ if you have team members who cannot work from home—reducing interaction between staff members when working and at ‘crunch points’ such as work arrival and departure, and when travelling around the workplace.
Whenever possible, you can encourage those who are susceptible to coronavirus, or who live with those who are, to work from home. If this is not feasible, employers must make specific arrangements for these team members to minimize risks. For staff who are pregnant, the same applies. Both of these evaluations should be rigorous and recorded.
Cleaning
A cleaning schedule documenting hand-washing, cleaning and daily sanitising of all areas of the workplace should also be documented, in addition to a documented risk assessment for your company.
The procedure will allow you to delegate responsibility for key activities (and review them regularly) and demonstrate due diligence in minimising coronavirus transmission.
Face coverings
The government’s new policy is that workers do not need to wear face coverings when at work to defend against COVID. You can continue to do so if you still need PPE as part of your company procedure, but you don’t need to implement this explicitly for coronavirus.
However, if your risk assessment specifies that face coverings are required, employers must provide their workers with these free of charge. Staff who wish to wear a face-covering should be permitted to do so and encouraged to wear it safely.
Outbreaks
Where there is a COVID-19 outbreak, you must have a specific plan in place that is communicated to employees. The plan should be comprehensive in your COVID-19 risk evaluation and include a single point of contact assigned to contact public health teams.
Your local PHE health security team should be alerted when there is more than one case in your workplace. You will have to log reports of all workers displaying symptoms if an epidemic is identified, so you must ensure that all the work records are up to date. The company will provide you with outbreak management information that will help you monitor the outbreak and interact efficiently with staff.
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Wrapping up
For quite some time, stringent precautions would have to be in place to protect the workers, consumers, suppliers and the general public. It will also include social distancing steps, daily hand-washing, the use of PPE (personal protective equipment) where appropriate, frequent surface cleaning and disinfection, symptom monitoring, and so on.
There are also health and safety steps to be taken concerning reopening workplaces closed during lockdown for a prolonged time. The tips involve updating the existing personnel and staff protocols, operating procedures and policies, the training you give to employees, modifying supplier distribution arrangements, and much more.
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