5 tips to manage your H&S during COVID

As an employer, you have an obligation to keep your people safe, including taking all reasonable steps to protect your workers and any visitors to your business from coronavirus.

Here are our top five tips for managing your workplace health and safety during Covid-19.

1. Carry out a Covid-19 risk assessment

Risk assessments are always an essential part of managing health and safety in the workplace, particularly on construction sites and other high risk environments. To keep your employees and contractors safe during the Covid-19 pandemic, however, you’ll need to carry out a dedicated Covid risk assessment.

As part of the risk assessment, you will need to:

Identify any activities or situations that may cause the transmission of the virus
Consider who could be at risk
Establish how likely it is that someone could be exposed
Act to remove any high risk activity or situations or, where if this isn’t possible, control the risk

2. Implement social distancing

Wherever possible, ensure that workers maintain social distancing guidelines, remaining at least 2m apart. This may include redesigning particular activities or re-allocating roles.

Where this isn’t possible, ensuring they are at least 1m apart, with further measures taken to reduce the risk of transmission, including:

Increasing hand washing and surface cleaning
Minimising the time spent carrying out the activity
Using screens or barriers to separate people
Using back-to-back or side-to-side working whenever possible
Introducing fixed teams or partnering to reduce the number of people each person has contact with

This applies to all aspects of the working day, including arriving at and departing from the site, travelling between sites, canteens and break rooms.

3. Manage your workforce

You may need to change the way in which work is organised in order to reduce the amount of contact each worker has with other people.

This might mean fixing teams or shift groups so that any unavoidable contact is always between the same people, identifying areas in which people have to directly pass things to each other and finding ways to remove direct contact, and minimising worker congregation at high traffic points.

4. PPE

If working in an enclosed space or where social distancing isn’t possible, you should encourage your workers to wear a face covering, along with the normal PPE they wear as part of their role.

It’s important to remember, however, that face coverings are not a replacement for other forms of risk management. You should also ensure that, if your workers are wearing face coverings, they use them safely.

5. Keep your teams aware

To effectively manage health and safety during the Coronavirus pandemic, it’s vital to keep your people well informed and aware of any special measures or changes to processes that you’re introducing.

You’ll need to provide clear and consistent communication to ensure that all workers understand the new ways of working and keep them engaged.

Tribuco Knowledge Base can help you develop and deliver training materials, that will allow you to keep your workers to remotely, without the need for face-to-face and group meetings.

To find out more about how we can help you give your team the Covid-19 training they need from the safety of home, please get in touch.