How to Prepare Your Office For a Safe Return to Work
As vaccines become more accessible to the public, employers all over the world ponder how to bring their workers back into the workplace. However, even though vaccines are making their rounds, many people still have concerns about returning to work safely.
Since March 2020, the office world has changed in a variety of ways. More and more people work from home now, and many thrive in that environment. Should they remain at home, or should they come back?
Moreover, how can the office stay sanitized? What safety tips can you enforce to keep your work environment safe for your workers?
In this article, we’ll address all of these questions to help you prepare your office so your employees can return for work.
The Good News: One-Third of Workers Have Returned To Work
If you’re worried about whether it’s the right time to return to work, there’s good news. It turns out, a significant portion of American workers are back at the office.
At the height of the coronavirus outbreak, most workers opted to work from home when possible. Slowly, many significant corporations are returning to work. However, many do this at a reduced capacity.
Some offices functioning at reduced capacity include Mastercard, the New York Stock Exchange, and Facebook. As you know, these are enormous corporations with hundreds or thousands of employees.
As such, they face more risks for reopening at full capacity than small businesses. So, if you’re wondering whether to open at full or reduced capacity, consider the size of your business.
Can you function at full capacity while maintaining social distancing? How many employees do you have? Do any of them prefer to remain at home?
The answers to those questions will inform you whether your office can fully reopen. To track how businesses across the nation are returning to normal, keep a close eye on news coverage of the issue.
Safety Tips for Office Preparation
If your workers are returning to work in any capacity, it’s time to figure out how your office day will flow. You can achieve this through several means and procedures.
First, depending on the size of your office and the number of employees, it may be wise to have standing entrance and exit times. This way, people know exactly when they should leave and enter the office.
By doing this, you can prevent any unnecessary build-up or congregating people. Another measure could be continually providing temperature checks at the door.
Even after COVID falls to the wayside, temperature checks can help ensure that nobody entering the workplace has a contagious illness. This procedure could be particularly helpful in cold and flu season.
Sanitize and Distance
Another helpful tip is to keep hand sanitizer dispensers in convenient locations throughout your office building. As we’ve all learned over the past year, hand sanitizer goes a long way to fighting infectious diseases.
Yet another factor to consider is how to run workstations and meeting rooms. When possible, it’s best to keep too many people from congregating in one place.
As such, you may consider placing a cap on how many people can sit at a single workstation or gather in one meeting room at once. If several people must meet at a time, consider using virtual meetings.
Stay Flexible and Adaptable
Lastly, the pivotal feature of successful reopening is flexibility. Coronavirus demonstrated to the world that many workers fulfill their job requirements perfectly well from home.
After a year of living in an adapted schedule, many of your employees may find themselves happier to work from home. If this is true of any of your workers, take some time to consider whether you can accommodate it.
It may be you don’t need all of your employees back at the office. However, if there are limits to how many of your workers can work from home, determine what workers you most need present in the office.
If others can work from home without impairing your work, let them do so. Try not to get discouraged if this is troublesome; you’re not alone in facing these issues.
Safety First: Invest In Disinfectant Products
As we begin returning to work from lockdowns, your cleaning staff is a critical component of your day-to-day operations. Even if you follow every social distancing procedure, there’s always a possibility that one person could contaminate a surface.
As such, you must maintain diligent cleaning in your office space. Disinfectant products, such as cleaning spray, disinfectant wipes, bleach, and other items will play a pivotal role in keeping your office safe.
To find the best EPA approved products on the market, you should check out OTT Safety Gear online today. Their products will be tremendous aids in keeping your office running smoothly.
While you may know the importance of cleaning high-touched surfaces, you may not know what specific surfaces to focus on. To give you an idea, we’ll list a few.
People often forget that objects like doorknobs, handles, and light switches are breeding grounds for bacteria. So many hands touch those surfaces throughout the day, making them easy transmission points.
Other vital areas to clean include workstations, desks, and cubicle doors. Keeping these areas sanitized helps ensure that people remain safe as they sit down to work.
Lastly, never slack off in cleaning your bathrooms. Sanitize the sinks and ensure the toilets remain in top condition, as these are other areas of high transmission.
Use Common Sense
The best safety tips for reopening your office are to use your common sense. So many actions necessary to fighting coronavirus are things you should do at any time. Washing your hands, cleaning work surfaces, and not working with a fever are straightforward ways of preventing an outbreak.
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