Safety refers to a condition in which the physical well being of people at work is protected. The main purpose of effective safety training and programs in organisations is to prevent work related injuries and accidents. Health refers to a general state of physical, mental and emotional well being of people at work.
A healthy person is free from illnesses that impair an employee’s ability to perform the essential functions of their job. So it is really important to provide safety training for your employees.
An estimated 3 billion workers are affected by lockdown worldwide as the pandemic runs its course. As the ratings are brought under control, more and more countries are cautiously easing their restrictions. More and more employers are wanting to know what their obligations are and what they need to do to protect their workers.
10 Reasons You Need Safety Training For Your Employees Post Covid
1. OSH Act
One of the main reasons you need safety training for your employees post covid is the OSHA. Under the occupational safety and health act of 1970 or OSH Act General Duty Clause, employers must provide a workplace free of recognized hazards that can cause death or serious injury including infectious disease like Covid-19.
One of the top employer’s OSH Act responsibilities, many states have created new regulations, policies and directives that make employee Covid-19 training or safety training post covid, a requirement for re-opening businesses. Before employees return to work, employers should provide training on some key Covid-19 safety like:
- Signs and Symptoms of Covid-19.
- How the virus is passed from person to person.
- Hygiene and work protocols to prevent transmission and exposure.
- How to properly use and care for PPE and face coverings.
By providing reliable, up to date training and guidance about Covid-19, you can ensure that employees who return to work feel informed, protected and confident.
2. Information
By reading the news all the time, we all know that the information on Covid is evolving daily. This is a novel virus and there is new information coming out every day as continuous studies are going on the virus.
Some of what we thought we knew during the early spread of covid, it may or may not be true now. So one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that whatever we are saying at a given time and whatever we are looking out in the workplace at a given time, it’s going to take constant observation and evaluation to make sure that we are still on the right track.
So this is one of the main reasons you need safety training for your employees post covid.
3. Strong Policies
The most important thing that anyone can learn from these safety training is to have good policies. Safety training makes us do our best in training employees on the signs and symptoms of infection. Once an employee learns these, he/she can help himself and others to keep them out of the workplace after understanding the symptoms.
It seems like everyone knows these things by now but I think it’s really important to make sure employees are very clear on what this disease looks like. The fact that the symptoms also keep changing in every wave, is something to really keep an eye on.
Safety training is also important for managers and supervisors so that they can recognize sick employees and send them home during the day. This training also makes sure that you have a solid plan for how to send these employees home.
4. Keeping People Apart
By providing safety training to employees you would be able to keep people at least 6 feet apart. It is one of the most effective things you can do to prevent transmission in the workplace. One of the things that can really help with that is to allow people who can effectively work remotely to continue to work, keeping those people to work out of the workplace.
After getting safety training employees would learn that when we talk about 6 feet, it should be considered an absolute minimum distance for extended work. Extended work means work that occurs longer than 15 minutes.
This training would let them think about eliminating meetings of more than 10 people. Thinking about other places where employees congregate like luncheon and break areas. Make sure you space those areas out to prevent groups of people from congregating.
There are areas in our facility that are really prone to crowding like locker rooms, time clocks, entrances and exits. Safety training would train us to implement physical distancing cues, markings on the walls, markings on the floor to remind people to stay apart from each other.
5. Using Barriers
Safety Training is important for employees post covid because it provides us the solution and alternate ways if some policies don’t work out. For example- If you can’t keep people 6 feet apart then we need to think about barriers when the distance can’t be maintained.
I’m sure everyone has seen these barriers at grocery stores, convenience stores, banks etc. This is really transparent barriers in places like perception areas, temperature screening areas, customer service counters and even in production lines where they just can’t be spaced out enough.
After getting safety training you would know that barriers shouldn’t be a substitute for using face coverings. Barriers should always be used in conjunction with face coverings.
6. Face Coverings
Safety Training will educate the employees that face coverings reduce the amount of viral particles that infected people shed in the workplace. Face coverings protect people around the wearer from the viral particles emitted by that person. Safety training emphasizes the fact that these should be used at all times.
These face covering should meet CDC guidelines which say that they should have multiple layers of fabric, should fit snugly to the face and allow breathing without restrictions.
7. Clean & Disinfect
Safety training will make the employees disinfect and educate them on how to disinfect the correct way with the correct item. Employees will disinfect daily and disinfect high-touch community surfaces like doorknobs, handles, elevator buttons, bathrooms etc., multiple times per day.
In environments where there tools are used where tools are shared, then the tools should be disinfected before sharing or before moving to a new work location. When disinfecting surfaces, make sure to always use an EPA registered disinfectant for use against Covid.
Safety training will educate employees about the EPA registered disinfectant as its website says that these infectants are effective against SARS-CoV-2.
8. Communication
One the reasons that you need safety training for your employees post covid is because it makes the employees communicate across all organisational levels. This is the place where plans often fall apart and you need to communicate the plans and policies multiple times through multiple methods to make sure everybody gets the message.
Have the plans and policies easily available to all employees. Ensure that employees supervisors and managers know their roles and expectations under the plan. We always have to have a plan for reinforcing compliance with the established policies.
These are new safety rules and they need to be enforced in the same way you have any other safety rule in the workplace. Safety training makes sure that the leaders at our work sites understand the need for modelling safe behaviours and actions as it pertains to the covid prevention plan.
9. A Phase Approach
What happens when the orders are lifted, businesses resume and employees return to work? Safety training provides a phased approach plan which avoids overcrowding and mitigate concerns about potential transmission is an approach many organisations are taking.
Having everyone come back to the office on day 1 is not realistic or smart. Human resources and operations teams must seize the opportunity to safeguard their health and safety. As well as to instill confidence that the office is a safe place to return to. Additionally, a phased approach can help reduce the risk of a contagious employee returning to the office and passing the illness to everyone.
Another way that Safety Training provides is by staggering employees’ schedules when returning to the office. Employers are considering assigning team shifts in alternate work hours, much like the phased approach. Schedule staggering limits the number of people allowed in a space at any given time.
Plan a staggered reintroduction to the office, establish a process such that a rotating group of employees work from the office every few days or at different hours of the day. This can also be beneficial for commutes, rush hour traffic.
10. Hope For The Best, Prepare For The Worst
Safety training really makes us hope for the best and prepare for the worst. This part is to make you think through how your workplace will respond if or when you identify one or more cases in your workplace.
Make sure that you know how to report a case, who to contact at your local health department, and understand that it is an employer’s responsibility to do contact tracing at the workplace. This means that somebody at the workplace needs to be able to identify all close workplace contacts.
You need to be able to identify those in the 48 hours prior to symptom onset or positive test. So thinking through the worst case in planning your work and how you are going to keep track of people who you have close contact with is really important in all aspects of your plan.
All of these plans and preventions can only be learned through proper safety training. So it is really important that you provide safety training for your employees post covid.
OSHA’s Tips To Prevent Coronavirus In The Workplace
- Assess Your Level Of Risk
OSHA’s guidance documents outline four different workplace risk levels for Covid-19.
- Very High risk applies to those jobs with high potential for exposure to known or suspected sources of covid. This includes health care workers, laboratory personnel.
- High Risk includes jobs with high potential for exposure to known or suspected sources of covid. This includes support staff workers and medical transport workers.
- Medium Risk jobs include those that require frequent close contact (within 6 feet) of people who may be infected with coronavirus but who are not known or suspected patients. This group includes employees who have frequent contact with international travellers or the general public like those who work in schools or high-volume retail settings.
- Low Risk applies to jobs that do not require frequent contact with people known or suspected of being infected with coronavirus or frequently interacting with the general public. Workers in this category have minimal contact with the public and other co-workers.
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Reducing The Risk
After assessing the risk, decide on the most effective steps you can take to reduce the potential for infections to spread in your workplace.
- Develop A Plan
Develop a plan to prevent infectious disease and a plan of how to respond to cases in the workplace. The plan should include the level of risks at various work sites and specific tasks. It should look at how to account for increased employee absenteeism, how to socially distance employees through staggering shifts, working remotely and other measures.
- Implement Basic Infection Prevention Measures
Prepare to implement basic infection prevention measures such as frequent handwashing, providing hand sanitizers that contain at least 60% alcohol, encouraging employees to stay home if they are sick, reminding people to cover their coughs and sneezes. This also includes providing customers and members of the public with tissues and trash receptacles.
- Develop Procedures To Identify And Isolate The Sick
Develop procedures for prompt identification and isolation of sick people if appropriate. What this could look like is encouraging employees to self-monitor for signs and symptoms and reporting when they are experiencing symptoms. You may want to develop training and policies to move potentially infectious employees to locations away from other workers, customers and visitors.
- Develop, Implement And Communicate About Workplace Flexibilities And Protections
Encourage sick employees to stay home. Make sure that sick leave policies are in place and are consistent with public health guidance and that employees are aware of these policies. Talk with companies that provide your business with contract or temporary employees about the importance of having sick employees stay home. Do not wait for a healthcare provider’s note for employees who are sick with acute respiratory illness.
Maintain flexible policies that allow employees to stay at home to care for sick family members. Be aware of workers’ concerns about pay leave and other issues that may arise during infectious outbreaks. Work with insurance companies to provide information to workers and customers about medical care in the event of an outbreak.
