Return to work planning
Covid 19 Return to Work planning doesn’t need to be difficult.
As a health & safety consultancy we are doing a lot of return-to-work plans across different industries. There are three common themes that will allow you to keep your plan in context.
Control: there are things you control and there are things you do not. What you do not directly control you will need to work in with those who do if it impacts you i.e. construction site; shopping mall, multi-tenanted premises.
Knowledge Sharing: we need to share our plan and controls with others especially all our staff and subcontractors. Equally, we strongly suggest you share it with those who you are a subcontractor too as well (upstream).
Risk: Covid 19 sits under the ‘health’ part of health & safety. As such it is just another risk that you need to put controls in for. What’s the risk and what are the controls.
You are hopefully familiar with the hierarchy of controls which sets out 6 levels of how we should manage our risk. Please note the last option is PPE (protective equipment). It should be the last thing we look at as you may find that by doing other controls you do not need PPE or not as much.
Getting back to business as soon as possible
Our goal is to have the business up and running as quickly as possible, so you get cash flow going again. The following explanations of each of the 6 levels is only a brief overview to get your thinking going.
1. Eliminate: tough to do with Covid 19 so not that practical.
2. Substitute: can also be tough to do but we should try… can we substitute a high-risk way of working to a low risk way i.e. can site inspections be done by phone / video by the worker on site rather than the Project Manager being there in person.
3. Isolation: this we can do by creating isolation hubs in our business i.e. separate the office, factory, depot, site workers and keep them out of each other’s isolation hubs.
4. Engineering Controls: practical where we can i.e. creating barriers / screens between work areas.
5. Administration Controls: definitely doable i.e. sharing information with workers, change our inductions, introduce posters, etc.
6. Protective Equipment: this is of course something we can and will do. We urge that you consider this the last step to take and not the first.
We welcome you to contact us for support and questions. John Gould who manages our ManageOSH Division will be your main contact and John is well versed in this space.
Please email him your interest. CLICK HERE You can also phone John on 0800 747 569 (0800 RISK NZ)
