Reopening Offices Safely
As the world begins to heal from this COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, governments, businesses and individuals across the globe are starting to build a path to return to normalcy.
We’re still some time away from being back to business as usual completely, of course, but if you’re a business manager or a people leader, this is great time to put together a plan for your people to return to the workplace. If you’re an individual contributor, this is a fantastic opportunity for you to step up your game and take the initiative by helping your leaders develop and implement such a plan.
The finer details of your office reopening plan will vary based on the size, nature and location of your business, but regardless of those variables, you’ll essentially need to address three key issues with your plan, namely:
When will you open your offices?
Who should return to those offices?
How will you ensure a healthy and hygienic workplace for your returning employees?
Addressing these issues will form the core of your office reopening plan, so let’s dive in.
When?
Begin your plan by stating the obvious: that you will adhere strictly to any lockdown or stay-at-home orders issues by local governments.
The precise date of opening will vary from location to location, but in addition to local government guidelines, you’ll also need to look closely at other factors such as:
Status of your city’s healthcare infrastructure
Capacity of the public transport system
Availability of childcare support
Status of schools / colleges
Status of retirement homes / old-age homes
These factors directly impact people’s ability to leave their homes and families, which means that need to feature prominently in your decision-making process.
Who?
So, who should come to the office and who should continue working from home?
First of all, people who are at a higher risk of getting infected should be asked to continue working from home wherever possible. This includes:
Older adults
Those with serious underlying medical conditions
Those with compromised immune systems due to pre-exiting conditions
Excluding that group, if you have more than 20 people working from the office, you should look to reopen gradually in multiple phases. Again, the exact number and duration of these phases will vary based on factors that are impossible to predict here, but in the first phase, have your offices operate at approximately 25% of their capacity.
This means that if your office can seat 100 people, only 25 people should be allowed to enter the office premises at any given time.
Now, the decision of whether your employees want to come in to the office during this first phase should ideally be voluntary, at least for the fist couple of weeks after you reopen your offices. Reevaluate and update our guidance on this as the situation develops, but begin by making this voluntary.
Doing so has three distinct advantages:
Your employees won’t feel pressured to come in to the office. Such pressure can create a lot of negative stress, which has in inverse relationship with productivity.
You’ll be able to follow social distancing norms much better with a lower population, and social distancing is our best line of defense against this virus right now.
You will get a “soft opening”, i.e., a chance to test your office preparedness with a smaller group. This will allow you to make adjustments, evaluate their effectiveness, rinse and repeat until you’ve perfected your process in a relatively low-risk environment.
How?
And that brings me to our next point, which is, how are you going to ensure a healthy and hygienic workplace for your returning employees.
Well, there are two parts to this question when you think about it:
What will you, as an organization, do to prepare your offices?
What should your employees do to prepare themselves?
Let’s look at each one of these factors.
Office Preparedness
So, what do you, as an organization, need to do to prepare your offices?
Firstly, even before your offices are opened, you need to have them cleaned, sanitized and disinfected as per the guidelines laid out by the Center for Disease Control and the local Health Ministry.
Offices should also be cleaned and disinfected thoroughly every single day. Furthermore, work with your employees to sanitize high-touch surfaces multiple times during work hours.
Next, provide a personal protective equipment kit to all employees who arrive at the workplace. This exact contents of this kit will vary based on local guidance, but in general, they should contain face masks, disposable gloves, hand sanitizers, alcohol-based cleaning supplies and paper towels.
As an added measure, see if you can set up a simple health station at your office entrance, armed with infrared thermometers and hand sanitizers, so that your employees can record their body temperatures and sanitize their hands as they enter the workspace.
Enforce social distancing by setting up workstations at a distance of at least ten feet from one another. This means that you’ll have extremely limited seating capacity in the first phase. To manage this capacity, you’ll need to implement a way for employees to book seats for themselves in advance. This can be achieved easily with a simple, no-frills spreadsheet hosted in the cloud.
Display prominent signages with rules and guidance of both your organization as well as those of your office building, so that your employees are aware of the do’s and don’ts at all times.
And that bring me to what your employees need to do.
Employee Preparedness
First up, your employees will need to use that registration spreadsheet to book their seats in advance. Use that same spreadsheet to confirm their attendance as well.
So, why should you be doing this? Well, in addition to the obvious benefit of not crowding your offices, you’ll also be able to use this data for contact tracing, so that if one of your employees develops symptoms of the virus, you can quickly reach out to the rest of your employees who may have been in the office with that person in the past week or so.
Moving on, your employees will need to fully comply with your organization’s health guidance while they’re in the office, which, at a minimum, means that they’ll need to:
Record their body temperature using infrared thermometers when they enter the office
Sanitize their hands every time they exit and re-enter the workspace
Put on a face mask when moving away from their designated workstations
Keep their workstations, desks and chairs clean using alcohol-based cleaning products and paper towels given to them as part of their personal protective equipment kit
Wear disposable gloves when cleaning their workstations
Avoid crowding common areas such as washrooms and break rooms, and minimize the use of elevators
Also, a quick word on using face masks properly: they need to cover your nose, mouth and chin at all times. In other words, the exact opposite of Batman.
And finally, ask that if they start showing symptoms of coronavirus themselves, or have been in contact with somebody who’s had symptoms, they’ll need to:
Inform your office about it
Stay at home
Self-quarantine for a minimum period of 14 days after fully recovering from those symptoms
So, those are some of the basic, founding stones for reopening offices safely. Hopefully, you can use this blueprint to build your detailed plan. Focus on simplicity and clarity as you develop your plan, and keep your employees’ health and safety at the absolute top of your list of priorities.
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