The CDC states social distancing, also called "physical distancing" is the best way to reduce the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19).

Educate your team on what social distancing is and make sure they understand the importance of practicing it.

This means implementing new protocols and administrative controls with clear messaging. Develop an Infectious Disease Preparedness and Response Plan. You can refer to OSHA's Guidance on Preparing Workplaces for COVID-19.

OSHA developed this planning guidance based on traditional
infection prevention and industrial hygiene practices. It focuses on  the need for employers to implement engineering, administrative, and work practice controls and personal protective equipment (PPE), as well as considerations for doing so.

Use this guide  for planning purposes and to help identify risk levels in workplace settings and to determine any appropriate control measures to implement. 

Enforce social distancing with visual reminders.

For example, floor signs and markers can help you clearly show customers and workers where to stand, wait and line up. You can also mark up walkways and common areas with floor tape and shapes (i.e. X's and arrows) to control foot traffic. Wherever possible, designate one-way walkways and staircases. 

Hygiene related safety signs can be used as reminders for employees to wash hands before returning to work or to customers to sanitize before proceeding to shop. Banners, posters and infographics help to instill social distancing best practices into the organizational culture.

You can ensure social distancing guidelines are strictly followed using a mixture of these visual reminders or contact us for custom orders. 

You can minimize contamination and unnecessary contact in your facility by keeping things separate. Factory areas should be fully zoned, and workers and equipment prohibited from entering non-essential areas/other zones.

While a large amount of this may already be in place, review how you can take your zoning up a level to prevent any unnecessary crossover.

This may require a review of your colour-coding policy and adding visual reminders. Colour-coded vinyl wall graphics, hallway signs or hanging signs work well to highlight the different zones.

You can also implement appropriate site segregation practices with partitions and retractable belt barriers. Use retractable belt barriers to cordon off certain areas or to guide the flow of foot traffic

Protect your workers and customers and minimize exposure with robust and easy to sanitize acrylic panels.

Make sure your workplaces are clean and hygienic. Surfaces (e.g. desks and work cells) and objects (e.g. telephones, tools) need to be wiped with disinfectant regularly. Refer to the World Health Organization's Getting your workplace ready for COVID-19 guide for more tips on this.

Promote regular and thorough hand-washing by employees, contractors and customers. Put sanitizing hand rub dispensers in prominent places around the workplace. Make sure these dispensers are regularly refilled and accompany them with signs and posters promoting hygienic best practices. Remember to include communication measures such as offering guidance from occupational health and safety officers, briefings at meetings to promote hand-washing

Promote good respiratory hygiene in the workplace. You can do this by displaying signage promoting respiratory hygiene. Ensure that face masks and / or paper tissues are available at your workplaces, along with closed bins for hygienically disposing of them. 
 

 

The most common times for workers to be in dense groups is when they are getting to or leaving from the plant, and on work breaks.

Staggering shifts and breaks is a great way to reduce the amount of people together at any given time, especially in concentrated factory areas such as manual packing lines, equipment stores and cafes. 

Reduce the amount of seating in common areas and stagger breaks with as little amount of people concurrently as possible.  

Whilst this may seem an administrative nightmare, remember that if everyone halves the number of people they come in contact with, it will reduce the 'reach' of that one person by more than 95% over the next 30 days! This could make the single biggest impact to preventing Coronavirus spreading through your workforce.