How to Help Keep Employees Safe During COVID-19

During the COVID-19 crisis, companies are having to tackle new challenges at a rapid pace and overcome obstacles no one could anticipate. One obstacle is how to help keep employees safe given new CDC guidelines for social interactions.

The CDC suggests people stay at least 6 feet away from one another, especially anyone who appears sick, to minimize the risk of getting the coronavirus. That leaves employers scrambling to provide the tools and assistance to set employees up to work from home or rearranging their workplaces to spread out their workforce.

Remote Workforce
Working from home is one of the best ways to help keep your employees safe. But, for many workforces, this is the first time they’ve extended a policy like this to such a large percentage of their workers. In some cases, staff have been asked to quickly pack up essentials and load sometimes bulky items into their car. When a large organization needs to get a lot of their workforce out of the office quickly, it can create chaos.

Organizations like Suddath^® quickly reacted to these needs by creating a systematic solution that helps get employees’ items packed, properly wrapped for transit and loaded into cars quickly and easily. This also helps minimize employees’ exposure to one another by spending less time in the building.

How to Practice Social Distance in the Office
While many employees have already made the transition to working from home, most companies have roles that must continue to report to the workplace, and often these roles are critical to keeping businesses operating at this time. Not only for the benefit of the employees and the company, but those working to continue to provide medical supplies, food and necessary items for people across the nation during this crisis. We’ve developed some tips to help your organization practice social distancing.

Separate employee workstations. The CDC suggests you stay at least 6 feet away from anyone who appears sick to minimize the risk of getting the coronavirus. Rearranging workstations to meet these guidelines before someone shows symptoms may help reduce risk.
Relocate employees to unoccupied space. If some employees are able to work from home, that may leave empty workstations throughout your building or on different floors to give employees more distance.
Move essential equipment to open areas. In order to have less people in confined spaces, you can move essential equipment, including printers and break room equipment to open areas.

How We Can Help
If your organization needs support to get your employees’ items packed to work from home or with space planning services for social distancing in the office, Suddath is here. We’ve developed services tailored to meeting those needs that we can render quickly and efficiently to help keep your employee safe.

To help employees to work from home, we can:

Provide packing materials and labels for employees
IT disconnects, including computers and monitors
Properly wrap valuables for transit
Move boxes and load into cars

To help your workplace practice social distancing, we can:

Provide space planning to adhere to CDC social distancing guidelines
Relocate employee workstations within the office, including IT disconnects and reconnects
Reduce common area capacity to CDC social distancing guidelines
Repurpose spaces to accommodate needs from social distancing de-densification
De-densify by repurposing conference rooms and common areas to work spaces
Reducing seating options in conference rooms to CDC social distancing guidelines
Label common area and break areas per CDC social distancing guidelines

We are truly living in unprecedented times, and Suddath is committed to continuing our work, so you can too. Contact us to learn more about how we can support you during this time.