According to the new Government guidelines, you should do the following:
1. Conduct a risk assessment
- Consider how to maintain social distancing and mitigating actions for activities where this may be difficult
- Share the results of your risk assessment with your employees
2. Consider who needs to be at work
- Everyone should work from home unless they cannot work from home
- You must monitor the wellbeing of people working from home and provide equipment for them to work safely and effectively
- You will need to consider the needs of clinically extremely vulnerable and clinically vulnerable individuals, which includes the need to treat all your employees equally
3. Manage your workforce to maintain 2m social distancing
- Manage your workforce to reduce the number of contacts each worker has and reduce unnecessary work travel
- Stagger work and break times
- Ensure that your workers are trained and kept up to date
4. Prepare your workplace
- Ensure that your workplace is clean and ready to restart and is kept clean after opening
- Consider redesigning the workplace to have more entry and exit points or one-way flows, or allowing people to work further apart from each other
- Provide hand sanitisers at entrances, exits and meeting rooms
- Consider whether any of your staff need to use personal protective equipment (PPE) and/or face coverings
5. Manage people and goods coming into and out of the workplace
- Minimise the number of unnecessary visits to the workplace and ensure visitors understand what they need to do maintain safety
- Avoid surface transmission for inbound and outbound goods
- Redesign delivery procedures to minimise unnecessary contact and maintain social distancing
The Government has provided eight separate guides to cover different kinds of work, which go into detail specific to your business area about what you need to consider concerning the eight topics above. The guidance is split into the following areas:
Construction and other outdoor work
Factories, plants and warehouses
