Ways to Protect Your Employees at Work

Offering protection systems and procedures at work to keep employees safe is paramount for companies at this time. It has never been more important than it is now despite it also being a time when many companies are seeing far fewer employees on their premises.Here are four ways to protect employees with their work.

1. Enforce Social Distancing Everywhere

Ensuring that social distancing is adhered to everywhere on-site is a big ask.The problem areas are natural choke points like corridors, corners from a corridor to a secondary corridor, or through a door to a larger office area. However, maintaining social distancing even in these circumstances is of vital importance. It reduces the chance of any early-stage infection being spread to other employees or visitors. You can create zones to separate employees who need to be present from site or office visitors in reception.

Whether staff should wear a face mask when on the premises is subjective. It’s certainly recommended and a best practice. But which face mask is best? We’ll discuss more on that next.

2. Provide Face Masks with a HEPA Filter

For employees on the front-line or those who are top executives that need to stay healthy to lead the company, a wearable face mask option is especially important. While N95 masks are the most commonly available, the elasticated straps can break, leaving them vulnerable without warning. A new improved wearable mask is available from LancsIndustries.com. It includes a HEPA filter for a higher level of air filtration than what an N95 face mask provides. It’s also less likely that the straps will snap and the mask falls away from the face.

3. Hands-free Door Openers

A useful addition to the office interior is to start using hands-free door openers. These are specifically designed to avoid employees repeatedly touching door handles and risking spreading germs through touch. There are different types of hands-free door opening systems depending on the door type, size, and weight, etc. Magnet mounts are quite common, but other systems also perform well.

4. Encourage Remote Working

Anyone who can remotely work at home should do so. This substantially limits the risk of germs spreading on the site and infecting several employees over a day or a few of them. IT staff should make laptops available that are configured to connect to the company’s systems from outside the premises. Using secure VPNs and other security procedures to maintain the health of the network is critical here.

Managers also need to adjust to worker productivity under remote working conditions. It is not an easy transition for many people. They will find working at home distracting and difficult to achieve. As such, sometimes productivity is lower than expected whereas other times people thrive and outperform.

Protecting employees at work helps to keep everyone healthy and safe. Companies need to invest more into resources towards this end which supports the employees and, in turn, helps the company to keep going.