Keeping Businesses and Offices Safe and Healthy After COVID-19

While the COVID-19 pandemic has not abated, many Americans have returned to their physical workplace, with millions now believing that they have a good understanding of how to limit risk as the outbreak continues. Thankfully, science and medicine have identified numerous ways to keep people relatively safe and healthy. Here are five specifics tips for your workplace to ensure that it is as safe as possible.

Limit Physical Touch

The ability for coronavirus to live on surfaces means you have to do whatever you can to limit the number of shared spaces touched by multiple employees. As such, your office may have to engage in some serious retrofitting. You may need to install a variety of contactless items, including doors and soap dispensers. You will also need to examine other hygiene-related improvements, including a touchless water dispenser for refilling water bottles. The issue with water bottles is particularly important, given that germs from a water bottle can easily contaminate a surface.

Stagger Schedules

Many states have enacted internal gathering restrictions and encouraged offices to keep as many people out of them as possible. This helps to limit crowd size, allow people to maintain social distancing, and keep COVID spread to a minimum if someone does have the disease. That being said, some businesses are not able to keep people out of them full time. As such, see what you can do to stagger schedules and ensure that there is a minimum of people in your office at one time. This is good for the safety of your employees. Furthermore, at this point, it is also suitable for their morale, as staggering schedules help to show your employees that you value their health and safety. 

Limit Outside Appointments

As noted above, you should do whatever you can to limit the number of people who are physically present in your office at any given time. As such, create an office policy that limits the number of people who are in your office at one time. Whenever possible, encourage your employees to use phone calls, secure messaging, or Zoom meetings to interact with clients, vendors, or other customers. Lock your door and make sure that people know you are open for appointments only. Last, create a schedule for your conference room, ensuring that there are not too many people in the same location at one time.

Sanitize Regularly

It would be best if you cleaned your office regularly. At this moment, that’s more important than ever. There are, of course, many options for enhancing the cleanliness of your office or retail space. It would help if you asked your employees to be more careful than usual and make sure they have access to any cleaning agents that they may need, including wipes and disinfectant spray. If you have a janitor or cleaning person on staff, make sure that they increase the frequency with which they clean. You may also want to hire an outside contractor to fill in the gaps when your office is not being cleaned. Just make sure you book the cleaning services as quickly as possible, as their services are in higher demand than ever! 

Alter The Layout

The layout of your office should be altered to respect social distancing. Create wide, one-way hallways for any common areas, and move desks, tables, and chairs to ensure that they are all six feet apart from each other.