10 Tips to Protect Your Employees’ Health During the Pandemic

Operating your business during the COVID-19 pandemic poses many challenges. Among those challenges, one of the most important is creating a safe environment to protect your employees.

Below you will find 10 tips provided by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to protect your employees and help them stay healthy.

Encourage Sick Employees to Stay at Home

Isolating infected individuals is an essential step to prevent the spread of COVID-19, so take measures to ensure that sick employees know that there won’t be reprisals if they stay at home.

Communication is Key to Protect Your Employees

Communication is key under the current circumstances. Talk with your employees, address their concerns openly, and make any necessary adjustments to mitigate risks for them and your clients.

Develop Remote Work Policies

Whenever possible, offer a remote work option to your employees. As many companies are discovering, there are many tools available that make remote work a feasible, realistic option. From Trello to Zoom and Teams, there is a software solution that fits your needs.

Contact Temporary Work Companies

If you work with outsourcing or temporary work companies, talk with them and encourage them to develop non-punitive sick leave policies that make it easier for sick employees to stay at home.

Promote Hygiene and Etiquette

Protect your employees implementing policies that promote safe practices. Provide soap, tissues, hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol, and any other product indicated by federal or state regulations. Also ask your employees to cover their mouth and face when they cough or sneeze using a tissue or the area behind their elbow.

Minimize Face-to-Face Interactions

Take steps to reduce in-person interactions among your employees. These measures may include:

Implementing remote work
Staggering shifts and breaks
Closing common areas
Marking one-way lanes on corridors
Placing standing spots on elevators
Using sneeze guards

Perform Routine Environmental Cleaning

Although COVID-19 spreads mainly through respiratory droplets, contagion by contact is possible as well. Therefore, high-touch areas such as countertops, handrails, workstations and doorknobs should be cleaned and disinfected regularly.

Reduce Travel

Business travel must be reduced to the bare minimum. With the many technological solutions available nowadays (see above the paragraph about remote work), this can be done without significatively slowing down your business.

Provide Educational Material

Having the right information at hand can make a big difference when it comes to handling a situation like the COVID-19 outbreak. Therefore, make sure your employees have access to accurate information and reliable educational material. The CDC and the U.S. Government’s official Coronavirus website are two good sources of verified data and useful materials.

Develop Policies to Apply When an Employee Becomes Sick

Finally, think what policies to apply if an employee becomes sick while at work. When that happens, the sick employee should be separated immediately from other employees and clients and sent home. Open this link to check the cleaning and disinfecting procedure you should apply to any area the sick employee visited.

More Coronavirus Resources

From communication strategies to ideas to advance your career working from home, these are some posts you may find useful to navigate the current circumstances.

At the Pomona Chamber of Commerce our mission is keeping you up to date with the most relevant developments in business management and administration so you and your company can take advantage of new opportunities. Contact us today by email (info@pomonachamber.org) telephone (909-622-1256), social media or click on this link to join and start enjoying the benefits of membership today.