After what may seem like the longest time, the world is now finally reeling back to its old forms. With more and more people gradually returning back to their workspaces, you may also be thinking of reopening your office for your staff. But since the time things were conventional, the current times require everyone to get used to the new normal style of doing things. Therefore, as a business owner, before opening the office premises to work, here are a couple of things that you should keep in mind, to ensure the safety of the people working for you.
Reopening Your Office
Cleanliness
It is imperative to maintain a greater level of hygiene in the offices, regardless of whether your staff is vaccinated or not, especially when reopening your office. Therefore, you should ensure that the place is being frequently cleaned. You can read here for more information about it. Also, it is important that every square foot of the commercial property is cleaned with disinfecting cleaning agents which are effective to kill any kind of illness-causing germs. Thus giving your employees a clean and hygienic environment to work in with full safety.
Proper Ventilation
The COVID-19 outbreak has helped to shed light on how important it is to maintain indoor air quality which can become a breeding ground of germs and diseases in a workspace. As there are always chances of air contamination in offices, you need to concentrate on the proper ventilation and filtration systems that would dilute and remove any harmful air particles before reopening your office.
Also, you should emphasize the minimum efficiency reporting value, also known as MERV, which is very crucial to maintain the air quality inside the office. The recommended number to follow is 13 for commercial setups to keep your employees safe.
Conduct air quality assessments, testing, design, and provide engineering guidance to improve ventilation efficiency of existing HVAC systems, support long-term air-quality monitoring, and create air-quality awareness. Adapt controls and sequencing to accommodate and monitor additional filtration needs, and additional criteria concerning recirculated air systems
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Social Distancing
Just not for complying with the rules, but for personal safety as well, it is better to stick with the guidelines issued by the authorities, and that includes following the norms meant for social distancing when reopening your office.
There should always be a minimum gap of 6 feet between people and the office occupancy must be maintained at 50 percent to avoid crowdedness. To ensure more physical distancing, as an employer, you must tweak the layout of your office a bit. There should be partitions between desks and seating arrangements.
The Last Word
Along with the above-mentioned, and definitely, before reopening your office, you should also try to minimize surface touching as much as possible. By providing touchless entry at the biometric entrance, employees can badge into the office space with the help of their smartphones.
Adhering to certain rules and regulations would be now the new normal. Constant sanitizing and a greater sense of personal hygiene will further help to keep the office safe for everyone to work in comfortably. Adhering to the rules and guidelines is important for everyone’s safety.
Do you have any suggestions for others before reopening your office that would help others? Please add your comments to the box below!