Businesses around the world are opening up, and employees are going back to work. While your digital marketing team can work from home, the warehouse staff can’t. Before they come back, here’s what you can do to ensure their safety:
Flexible Policies
Your workplace policies can no longer follow the earlier patterns from before the crisis. As a warehouse manager, you should be more empathetic than you were and encourage your staff to stay home if it isn’t important for them to show up.
It would be best to revisit your sick leave policies. If a warehouse employee is sick, don’t ask them to visit a healthcare provider to get a leave note signed to validate their sickness. Minimize the burdens on the healthcare system and help your employees relax during this time.
If a warehouse employee tells you that a family member is sick, encourage them to stay home and look after them. Don’t pressurize your employees to return to work if they aren’t completely comfortable. In a nutshell, make sure you’re making it easier for your workforce to continue working.
Minimize Risk Of Infections
To make things safer, you need to change your warehouse design to minimize the employees’ risk of exposure and encourage social distancing. This involves creating designated 6-feet apart workstations and creating partitions between them. You can also limit employee contact by implementing a one-way traffic flow. Take help from visual cues and signs to do so.
Schedule breaks strategically in a way that the entire team doesn’t gather in the warehouse at the same time. You should consider staggering shifts for the purpose. Integrate sanitation stations at different spots in the warehouse and encourage employees to sanitize their hands regularly.
You also need to change the way your warehouse delivers packages. Implement contactless and zero-interaction delivery options. Create a designated pickup location – don’t make your employees interact with vendors and partners if it can be avoided.
Authorize a single person to deal with a certain consolidation area to create touch-free order consolidations.
Employee Safety Training
As an employer, you should invest in basic occupational first aid training more than ever. The course equips your employees with the necessary knowledge of helping one another at the time of medical emergencies at the workplace. Since emergency medical care centers are no longer safe to visit, such courses can help employees minimize incidents at warehouses.
The course also helps employees deal with and manage respiratory failures at distress at work. Especially in times like these, employees need to be trained to help each other with first-aid without putting their health at risk.
Metro Safety specializes in a number of Red Cross basic life support training and occupational first aid courses. We are helping businesses make their warehouses safer with our specialized occupational safety courses.
For more information, call 604-521-4227 today.
