Amidst the ongoing pandemic following safety protocols, many states are opening non-essential businesses and have relaxed the stay-at-home orders a lot. But when it comes to reopening your business, there are a lot of safety protocols that need to be followed. If the return on investment is poor for the business. Then, it’s bad news. So, you can increase ROI using surveys.
Your major concern at this point has to be: safety. It should be your duty to provide a well-sanitized workplace for both your customers and your employees. Workplace safety affects many people and so this is an area where you cannot take any risk!
For most businesses, at present, the primary key to get back in business has to be prioritizing the safety and health of both employees and customers. You need to make the safety protocols clear to your staff and strictly abide by them. Today’s business is all about the customer experience and the way they perceive the business in their eyes.
So being precautious is very important but with such high stakes, it is normal to get overwhelmed at times. To help you get through this ordeal, I have prepared an all-comprehensive checklist to go through before re-opening your business:
Review safety protocols:
This employee journey mapping initiative is not a one-time process. You need to review all the protocols as assigned by the various organizations like OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), CDC (Centres for Disease Control), Department of Labour, etc along with the ones issued by your government. These will give you a clear idea of the things to maintain for maximizing the safety inside your workplace
Reconstruct your floor plan for Safety protocols:
Reconfigure your entire workplace and plan out how you should follow the written protocols. Ensure that there is a minimum of 6-ft. distance between your employees, customers, or visitors.
Also, you need to develop your response policy carefully in events when your employer or customer gets the disease. Formulate a plan of how your business will handle such situations.
Establish a set of “no-contact” rules:
Limit your workers or customers from too much of physical contact inside your store like handshaking, hugging in closed spaces.
Physically arrange your workforce in such a way that there will be lesser chances of forming a crowd in small places.
Follow the common public safety codes for implementing this:
- Rearrange your furniture, workstations, seating area for maintaining a minimum of 6ft. distance wherever possible
- Try making arrangements for outdoor seating areas for eating during lunch breaks
- Establish social distancing practices for common areas in your workplace and allow lesser people to stay there for a prolonged period
- Make use of colored tapes to ensure your employees know where it’s not allowed to sit and illustrate signs showing people keeping a strict 6 feet distance.
Create prominent sanitization stations and keep refilling your sanitizers and sprays:
You need to invest a lot in sanitizers and ensure their availability at all times in your stores. So make sure to buy sanitizers that have >60% alcohol content present.
If you have owned an eatery, it is advisable to provide a sanitizer bottle at every table. If you own a bookstore or clothing store, a sanitizer bottle should be available at the entry and at every corner of your store for easy access throughout your customer’s shopping experience.
Try making these sanitization methods strictly non-contact by placing them on a stand that can be controlled by a pedal. On pushing this, your customers should be able to use the sanitizer instead of having to touch it by hand.
Procure sufficient PPE for your staff:
Your business can be such that the no-contact goal is not possible. In such cases, you need to ensure that your staffs have access to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). OSHA requires some industries to utilize standardized facemasks like the N95. But even if your industry doesn’t fall under that category, you need to ensure that every one of your staff has a proper mask covering their nose and mouth.
Also, make sure that your shop has a sign saying – “No mask, No entry” which will establish that your staff has the right to deny entry to any customer, client, or employee from entering the premises without a proper face mask. If you have ever thought of automation might kill job opportunities. Then, you would be interested to know that automation makes more jobs than we seem to imagine.
Make arrangements for employee and customer screening measures:
Before allowing entry to your employees or customers you need to ensure that they do not show the symptoms of the disease. Keep temperature checking devices and screening questionnaires ready for your customers and employees before letting them work or explore your store.
Make sure that a trained individual is available at the entry for taking your employee or customer’s temperature according to the safety guidelines required.
Moreover, you need to check that you maintain a properly sanitized environment for your employees to work in and your customers to explore fearlessly. According to CDC- “Current evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 may remain viable for hours to days on surfaces made from a variety of materials”, so to avoid this potential spread, ensure the disinfection of your workplace regularly. There is much additional knowledge that customers can gain as well. You want to increase sales from surveys then the solution is right here.
If you follow the steps mentioned above, your organization should be ready to face the “new normal”, while resuming business. If you think we skipped out some essential point on the safety checklist. Thank you for reading the entire article with utmost patience. Please do leave a comment down below and share with us your views regarding the topic. It would be great to hear from you. Feel free to offer any suggestions that you want to share with us. We will be absolutely delighted to hear your suggestions and improve our content.
