Assessing Your Workplace For COVID-19

It's important to carry out a thorough risk assessment of your workplace, this will likely cover these five key areas.

• Develop cleaning, handwashing and hygiene procedures in line with Government guidance

• Encourage and help staff to work from home

• Take all reasonable steps to maintain a 2m distance in the workplace

• Where people cannot be 2m apart, do everything practical to manage transmission risk

• Share the results with your staff

These are the people who will undertake the assessment, interpret Government guidelines and develop your own unique policy for bringing staff back to the office. Be sure to involve:

• Human resources
• Operations and facilities teams
• Your executive board/team
• Your office manager

It's important to involve your staff in their return-to-work planning. This will help you understand what they expect, what works for them, and especially foster a sense of community in when you re-open your office after COVID-19. This will help develop a robust office strategy.

• Send all of your staff a survey
• Hold virtual focus groups, or online interviews
• Ask about their expectations
• Appetite for virtual or home working
• Any concerns or anxieties

You're going to have to think carefully about how adapting your office for the new COVID-19 way of working will impact different spaces.

• Assess your floor plans and workspaces in their current form
• Establish the capacity of all your office workspaces based on 2 metre space restrictions
• Set standards for your reception and welcome areas
• Ensure consistency across the different spaces in your office

We strongly advise that you limit the number of meetings being held on-site and still try and have virtual meetings where possible. However, there are some instances whereby visitors will still be required to visit your office. Commonly, these will be short-term, high-frequency visitors like delivery personnel.

• Establish conventions regarding external visitors / contractors
• Establish procedures for accepting deliveries
• Revise visitor arrangements to ensure social distancing
• Let staff know of procedures for personal deliveries

This will be staff and guest's first experience of your post-COVID-19 workplace policy. Be sure to get all of the basics right here, as it will influence the rest of their visit to your office. It's especially important to think about all the different types of visitors and ways they may access your office.

• Establish need for additional parking or bike rack facilities to account for reduced use of public transport
• Review storage space for employees' clothes and bags
• What entrance or exists can be closed?
• Set standards for one-way traffic flows
• Set standards for lift lobbies, lift usage and/or escalators

Once people are in your office, it's important to ensure they're still following safe distancing practice while moving around your office. With all of these, make sure you consider fire and building regulations.

• Establish circulation paths to control movement flows
• Set standards for common walkways
• Identify high-risk bottlenecks and address these (such as access doors and security-pass points)
• Identify high-frequency walkways
• Re-assess your floor plans
• Identify where one-way movement flows can be introduced

This is where staff will most likely spend most of their time while in your office.

• Establish capacity limits for desk spaces
• Replace desk space to allow 2m distance between workstations
• Re-purpose hot desks
• Plan deks booking system for all workstations
• Consider shared utilities/items and if they are necessary

Less than 8 capacity

More than 8 capacity

• Single
• Disabled
• Group

• Libraries
• Multi-faith/prayer rooms
• IT support space/help desks
• Storage areas/coat cupboards/shower rooms
• Fitness areas

Once they are established, avoid changes so that where contact is unavoidable, this happens between the same people

• Single
• Disabled
• Group

• Libraries
• Multi-faith/prayer rooms
• IT support space/help desks
• Storage areas/coat cupboards/shower rooms
• Fitness areas