Ina van der Watt | Director | Universal Corporate Wellness | mail me |
With President Cyril Ramaphosa having announced a phased lifting of the lockdown, many business owners and managers are preparing for the safe return of workers to the workplace.
“All businesses that are permitted to resume operations will be required to do so in a phased manner, first preparing the workplace for a return to operations, followed by the return of the workforce in batches of no more than one-third.“
– President Ramaphosa during his announcement
A document developed by the Ministry of Health prior to the President’s announcement stipulates furthermore, that all businesses must have COVID-19 risk assessments and plans in place, and conduct worker education on COVID-19 and protection measures before they will be allowed to operate.
This document also contains a number of health and safety rules that are to be adopted across all sectors of the economy and ‘alert levels’, including stringent social distancing measures.
Business continuity
We put a number of business continuity contingency plans into action well ahead of the lockdown. These plans were based on guidance from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) and the Department of Health, and are designed to ensure that staff are kept as healthy and productive as possible during the pandemic, while ensuring that our service levels to our clients remain at their usual high standard.
The upshot of these measures has been that we have not only been able to continue to effectively provide health services throughout the lockdown period, but we have also garnered considerable experience in protecting those employees who form part of the core teams required to come into the workplace on a daily basis to perform critical business functions.
The practices we adopted have pre-empted the requirements of the Government’s rules document for those businesses that will be able to have employees returning to work after 1 May.
We are proud of this and feel that our experience in this regard may be of benefit to corporates and business owners who will have staff members returning to work in the near future.
So what do the State’s new rules for the staged phase out of the lockdown stipulate?
- Corporates and industries should continue to work from home remotely where possible.
- Workplace protocols must be put in place for the prevention of the spread of COVID-19 infection as well as for disease surveillance.
- Social distancing measures must be implemented in the workplace.
- All employees must be screened on a daily basis for symptoms, including a symptom check and temperature assessment. They should also all use cloth masks, particularly where social distancing may represent a challenge.
- Sanitisers and/or hand washing facilities with soap must be made available.
- Workers above the age of 60, as well as workers with comorbidity identified by the Department of Health should be offered a work-from-home option or allowed to remain on leave with full pay.
Social distancing key
Social distancing is a key defence against the spread of the COVID-19 and so we quickly took various measures to implement it within the workplace, including by physically distancing employees in the office by creating more space between desks and workstations.
This was made easier by the fact that a large number of our staff members were working from home, which provided the company with more office space to ensure that all workstations could be well separated from one another.
We commenced monitoring staff and visitors coming into our office building for signs and symptoms of the virus and checking their temperatures. Hand sanitisers were placed in all entrances and exits, for use by staff and visitors when they enter and leave the offices, and were also placed in each bathroom and other strategic points.
In addition, we took steps to ensure that, where possible, staff worked in well-ventilated spaces. We leave all inter-leading office doors open so that door handles do not have to be touched. A regular disinfection regime of high-touch surfaces in particular was also implemented.
The pandemic has not only resulted in us having to take precautions within our office space but has also quite radically changed how we provide services to clients.
We have, for example, limited scheduled face-to-face counselling to cases where it is really needed, rather scheduling telephonic or video counselling where this is possible.
In conclusion
We have also had to put in place a number of specific contingency measures in close cooperation with each individual client and adapted our operations and policies where necessary in order to ensure that we are able to continue to deliver the most effective and meaningful services possible to them over this time.
So while onsite debriefings continue to go ahead, the focus is now largely on virtual COVID-19 screening and awareness. We are working clients to ensure that these are undertaken with all due precautions being taken to protect their employees.
These are unprecedented times not only for Universal, but for all businesses. In our experience, however, with careful planning innovative ways can be found to not only continue to provide meaningful and quality services to our clients, but to play our part in helping to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.
