What are the best tips to ensure a safe return to the office?
- Examine your workplace
- Institute a pre-screening policy
- Invest in air purification
- Create sanitation stations
- Stay on top of what’s working
After spending years working from home, the idea of calling your people back to the on-site feels challenging for many businesses.
And sure enough, getting comfortable in the new normal isn’t easy — our idea of safety and cleanliness has transformed in recent events. We now know that we have to take several precautions to keep our people safe from sickness and disease.
Thankfully, there are a few key steps you can take to reduce the risk in your workplace. To help you get started, here are our top tips for a safe return to the office:
Examine your workplace
First, assess the space in your workplace. Look at the workstations, common areas, and other places your people will be. Consider how you can ensure they’ll stay safely distanced in these spaces.
This might be done by setting capacity limits. Another thing you can do is rearrange furniture, such as in your cafeterias and meeting rooms so that they encourage physical distancing. The flow of traffic can also be curbed by designating stairwells for going up or down, and doors for entrances and exits.
You can also cut down on how many people are in your building at a time by using hybrid schedules. This adjusts how many employees come into the facility, and how many work remotely.
Institute a pre-screening policy
Next, create and implement a pre-screening policy. Make these policies clear to everyone, and make it easy for them to follow them.
Always remind them to get checked or examine themselves for sickness before reporting to the office. This is an easy way of preventing sickness from spreading in your workplace!
Encourage employees who feel sickly — like those experiencing body aches, high fevers, colds, coughs, and the like — to report their symptoms and stay at home.
This greatly reduces the risk of even common illnesses like the flu from spreading amongst your employees!
Invest in an air purification
Aside from following the usual social distancing and reporting protocols, you must equip your office with the right tools to ensure clean air at all times.
As we now know, many illnesses are transmitted through the air — making indoor air purification crucial for keeping your people safe! So, it’s high time for you to consider making an investment in HEPA air purifiers for each workstation.
UV Care’s Medical Grade H14 HEPA Filters air purifiers promise to eliminate at least 99.998% of harmful pathogens in the air. This means that it can remove a vast majority of sickness-inducing germs and bacteria within your office.
But which one should you invest in? To get the most out of your investment, consider UV Care’s HEPA air purifiers.
UV Care’s air purifiers are powerful and efficient enough — thanks to our superior UV-C design and ViruX(R) patented technology tested by 2 independent international laboratories to eliminate 99.97% SARS-CoV-2 in less than a minute. Only UV Care’s ViruX(R) has this fast acting Covid killing capability. This is the best air purification system for any office.
Aside from smaller models that can be placed at any workstation, we have larger units, like our Supreme Plasma UV-C Air Cleaner. This model can consistently deliver clean air indoors for spaces up to 325 m² — making it ideal for just about any workspace.
Don’t have much space for more appliances in the office? Don’t worry. We also offer Aircon UV Sterilizers, which can be easily attached to any window-type or split-type AC unit.
We carry a variety of air purification solutions to help you make your office a safer place to be!
Create sanitation stations
Another investment you should consider making is a sanitation station.
It might seem like overkill, but it isn’t. Even common office supplies like paper, pens, books and the like can become carriers of sickness if you’re not careful!
These areas will become so essential for your workplace — it’s a quick and convenient way of reducing the number of germs and bacteria that are accumulated on the things you handle at work.
So, pick up a Sterilizing Cabinet 2.0 (or two!) from UV Care. Our sterilizer boxes use UV-C light to kill up to 99.99% of all germs and bacteria, including staphylococcus aureus, salmonella, E. coli, and campylobacter. They also offer multiple sterilization modes, and quick operation time — so you can disinfect your things at the office like laptops, gadgets, stationery and documents in a matter of minutes.
Placing these appliances in convenient locations around your office will encourage your employees to take advantage of this quick disinfection solution. Soon enough, you’ll be able to stop the spread of common sicknesses!
Stay on top of what’s working
Ensuring the safety of your people indoors is an ever-evolving situation — which means you always have to stay on top of safety protocols.
To do this, communicate endlessly with your employees as they return to the office. Allow them to express their concerns and ask questions about how this transition is going for them. And, most importantly, ask them for their feedback!
This will help you figure out what’s working for your office, and what still needs some tweaking. Maybe you need to encourage safely distanced meetings more often, or add more air purifiers to your workspace.
Whatever it is, always consider new safety measures when you can. It should make your people feel more comfortable going back to the office!
Key Takeaway
Follow these five simple tips for a safe return to the office — they’re key to creating a building where your employees feel comfortable working.
And, don’t forget that UV Care is here to help with all your sanitization concerns! We’d be happy to help you learn more about our products, and provide assistance in creating a clean workplace. Our air purifiers are highly-recommended by experts from the DTI, DILG, DOH, DepEd, and DOT to ensure clean air for all spaces.