Business Franchise Australia and New Zealand
FOR RETURNING YOUR PEOPLE TO WORK SAFELY
overwhelming question in recent weeks: ‘How do I get my people back to the office, so they feel safe?’
“With many employees anxious about heading back to the office – and some too afraid to even return to work – the next few weekswill be crucial for many organisations, as they begin a slow and staggered return to the workplace. If businesses haven’t taken appropriate steps to minimise virus-related risks on-site, it could open them up to the risk of infections, Work Cover claims and negative publicity. That’s why we have created a stepby-step guide to help businesses transition back to work and manage this ‘new normal.’”
Cleancorp’s 9-step transition plan to minimise COVID-19 risks for employees, customers, and visitors as they return to the workplace:
area of the workspace in square metres and divide it by four. To allow for objects, such as desks and boardrooms, divide the space by eight. For example, if your office is 160 square metres, you could only have up to 40 people in the room, to allow each person to have four square metres of space.
Initiate a rotational working system
Once you have calculated how many employees you can have on site, create a roster system that includes all relevant employees. For example, if you employ 100 people, divide that by five working days, and you’ll find yourself with a 20 person ‘team’ that can come into the office on a set day per week. However, don’t forget the four-square metre rule, which can be achieved by re-configuring furniture to increase physically distancing or getting staff to ‘own’ a different desk to what they are used to. Lisa says: “Whether your employees are rostered on weekly, fortnightly, on a ‘team’ basis, or an every-other-day basis, once you have your roster in place, I strongly recommend that each person uses the same desk or workspace each time they are at work. Hot-desking and shared workspaces present too much of a risk.”
Appoint an on-site COVID-19 champion
or support. They would also manage the upgraded cleaning schedule for your office or workspace and ensure team members remember to wipe down and clean their equipment after use. Lisa says: “Choosing a champion that keeps everyone aware of best safety principles – from good respiratory hygiene to encouraging people to stay home if they show any flu-like symptoms – will reassure staff that their health and safety is the priority. It also has the benefit of making them feel like their organisation is ‘there’ for them, and that they have the emotional comradery they need in our new style of working environment.”
Create a plan for ongoing sanitisation
Consider equipping each employee with their own bottle of hand sanitiser, hospital-grade anti-viral disinfectant, and cleaning cloth when they return to the workplace. Having individual sanitary equipment will also alleviate any worry that multiple people are handling the disinfectant.
Assess and determine how to use shared meeting spaces
Up until the outbreak of COVID-19, openplan offices with shared desks and ‘pod’ meeting areas were becoming the preferred way of working for many organisations. However, for the foreseeable future, these more casual meeting spaces with soft furnishings – surfaces that need to be steamcleaned, often at a considerable expense – should be avoided, as a virus has the potential to last on these surfaces for up to 24 hours. If you can, choose a more traditional meeting room with hard surfaces. Although the virus can live on glass, plastic, and stainless steel for up to 72 hours, these surfaces are much easier to clean and disinfect.
Incorporate company vehicles into your cleaning schedule
If you have company vehicles, forklifts, or trucks, these now also need to be included in your cleaning schedule – especially if multiple people use the vehicles. A minimum of one precautionary COVID-19 clean a week will ensure all surfaces within the vehicle’s interior are fully cleaned, and all external touchpoints are also cleaned, such as door handles and side-view mirrors.
Consider a cleaning concierge service
Most organisations – especially larger ones – have high-risk shared touchpoints used by site visitors and staff. These are best managed by a fully trained day-cleaning team who are uniformed and equipped to sanitise and disinfect touchpoints all-day long – whether they be kitchens, bathrooms, or meeting rooms. Though some might regard it as extreme, having an on-demand cleaning service will restore stakeholder confidence in your organisation’s hygiene standards day-in and day-out.
Hire a commercial cleaning specialist
Some cleaning companies have had to adapt quickly to the new COVID-19 risk environment, while others, especially professional commercial cleaning services, have been cleaning to a hospital standard for many years. Lisa says that organisations, especially those who have committed to additional safety standards, such as ISO 45001, should seek cleaners whose services are ISO certified. She says: “Even before the outbreak of COVID-19, Cleancorp – which is one of the few Australian cleaning companies to have achieved three ISO Certifications – was using vacuum pumps with HVAC poweroperated scrubbers, and chemical foggers, to keep workplaces free from viruses.”
www.cleancorp.com
Life is complicated. In fact, it’s more complicated than ever with everything that society is going through with COVID-19, to the lack of uncertainty of what life will look like coming out the other side. It is now more important than ever to think usefully.
Here are five tips to help you do exactly that.
Positive thinking doesn’t really work, useful thinking does
Typical motivation speakers tell us to be positive. Our parents told us to try and be positive. Our teachers told us to be positive. Well, here we go. Idea number one. Positive thinking doesn’t really work.
I don’t teach positive thinking. I teach this word ‘useful’. Because with everything that is happening if you have been in a rut the last six days, six weeks, or six months it’s not positive thinking that’s going to get you out of it. It’s useful thinking.”
If you feel like you are at ground zero in your life, the question is not how you can be positive, but rather what is the most useful thing for you to do to get from zero to two?
What is the most useful action for you to take in your life to get from two to five? What about to get from five to eight? To progress, the question is also what the most useful thing for you to believe about your reality is? This thinking leads you to discover what is essential and helps get you through this situation.
Times are tough if you let them be
Some people would rather subscribe to tough times. These are tough times. These are unprecedented challenging times. Some people love to be unhappy and want to stay that way. If this is you, I do have some good news for you. You will have a lot of friends. You will probably have minimal personal success from here, but on the plus side, you will have lots of people to discuss the seriousness of these tough times. Misery does, in fact, love company.
Gratitude leads to greater things
Let me ask you, do you spend most of your time thinking about all the wrong things or
all the things that you have going for you? Do you think about all the things you don’t have, or do you think about all the things you have?
Forget all the things you have. Some people right now may not feel that they have that much. That’s not what is important. Instead, do you think about all the things you don’t have or do you think about all the opportunities that could be coming? That’s what really matters. It opens your mind to the possibility.
Your body reflects your mind
There is something that helps us called the mind-body Loop. Useful Beliefs affect the thoughts that you have in your mind, and it changes your perception of how you view the world. Those thought patterns and beliefs, in turn, influence your body movement. By the same token, how you move your body affects what you think about. What the mind harbours, the body will manifest.
Healthy people have better posture than sad people. Successful people have better posture than people who feel they are failing. If you watch someone with excellent posture, you’ll notice that their body language conveys that they are alert and awake. When the body is alert and awake, the mind is alert and awake too.
The first words we say every day
It is even amazing when we look at the words we say to ourselves first thing in the morning to start our day. Do we use words that get us excited for the gift of a new day? Or do we use words that tell us what a grind today is going to be? The most important words we say all day are the words we say to ourselves, about ourselves when we are alone by ourselves. Most people are cruel in those moments. Be nice. Be the best version of you.
Chris Helder is one of the world’s most outstanding speakers on the topic of communication, leadership and influence. He is the author of the newly released book The Simple Shift as well as the bestselling Useful Belief, Cut the Noise and The Ultimate Book of Influence.
Find out more at www.chrishelder.com