There is one thing we know. COVID-19 can be exceptionally contagious in crowded workplace settings. Businesses can use symptom checking and conduct safety audits to protect their employees.
Download our Symptom Checker and Health and Safety Audit template.
There is no single miracle measure that employers can adopt to create a COVID-19 free workspace. Not all jobs can be done remotely, which is why there is no one size fits all approach to protecting employees. After the virus ripped through a call center in Seoul and shutting down food processing plants across the world, authorities now advise employers to keep workers as far apart as possible. Employers can use these physical job attributes to evaluate which positions in the company have the highest COVID-19 risk:
It's crucial to ask your workers these questions to understand their perspective based on their positions, allowing employers to get a holistic view of the COVID-19 risk to identify the most effective measures to keep their workers safe.
Once safety measures such as providing and mandating personal protective equipment (PPE), keeping workers at least 2 meters apart, and staggering start times and break times are put in place, employers can evaluate the effectiveness of their safety measures through employee pulse surveys.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have seen how data collection can help control the spread of COVID-19. Employers can use daily symptom checkers and conduct regular safety audits to measure the effectiveness of their health and safety policies and prevent the spread of the virus.
Daily symptom checkers can be easily administered through technology. Companies can schedule self-reporting symptom checkers for employees to complete before their shifts. The data collected from the self-reporting assessments allow employers to track their employees' health and be alerted in real-time when employees report symptoms. The data from these assessments can also be used to identify hotspots and trends, where employees showing symptoms are clustered or dispersed.
Click here to download our Symptom Checker Survey Template.
Another simple way to evaluate the effectiveness of the company's COVID-19 health and safety measures is by conducting Safety Audits. Safety audits don't have to be just done by the joint health and safety committee or HR. Every employee can be an auditor. Employers can schedule these audits to employees regularly to get real-time feedback on what's working and identify gaps to improve on. An example of a survey question to include in the Health and Safety Audit Survey:
From Strongly Disagree ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to Strongly Agree, to what degree are employees following these safety protocols at the worksite?
✔ Wear personal PPE (e.g., Mask to be worn in the common area)
✔ Use hand-washing and hand sanitizer stations
✔ Disinfect individual workspace daily
✔ Follow physical distancing rule
✔ Use physical barriers (e.g., Plexiglass barriers between co-workers/customers)
✔ Participate in employee health screening
✔ Complete visitor health screening
✔ Follow floor markings/arrows
✔ Understand our Covid-19 safety training
✔ Follow employee check-in and out procedures
✔ Use signage in and around the workplace
✔ Limit face to face meetings
✔ Limit the number of people in the elevator
✔ Follow the staggered shifts/breaks/days in office
✔ Deny visitors/clients in the workplace
Click here to download our Health and Safety Audit Survey Template.
The data collected from employees allows employers to identify if workers are following the safety measures. Employers should adopt a tool that will enable them to slice and dice their data by employee demographics (e.g., position, location, supervisor, etc.) to identify areas requiring more training and communication to ensure workers follow these protocols.
COVID-19 is a catalyst for improving the physical safety of workers. Unfortunately, this won't be our last pandemic, and every employer should use this pandemic as an opportunity to instill and improve their health and safety culture.
How Can We Help?
Retainify offers a unified solution that allows employers to track their employees' sentiment throughout their employment life cycle in real-time. From onboarding to exit, our customers can customize and automate their employee surveys and measure what truly matters to them.
Find out more at https://www.retainify.com
Contact Us: hello@retainify.com
