How To Safely Reopen Your Office During The Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has been hard for all kinds of businesses. If you’ve had to keep your office closed but are now able to reopen, there’s a lot to prepare if you’re going to do this safely and keep staff and customers safe. The way your business works will likely have to make some changes to be safe. Here are a few tips to help you prepare to reopen the office. 

Social Distancing

You might be able to open the office again, but you must remember that the virus is still a risk. Once you open the building, you will need to maintain social distancing between your team. Prepare the office so your employees feel safe when they come into work and don’t have to worry about proper social distancing. 

Make sure the distance between employees is always the recommended six feet. This means leaving enough workspaces and considering the space in communal areas. You might need people to spread their breaks out more than usual, especially if your breakroom isn’t large. Think about how to handle narrower areas like corridors or toilets. You might need to restrict how many people can go into bathrooms, or which cubicles can be used or to implement one ways systems through narrow corridors. 

Make sure you are still letting people work from home as much as you can. You might feel safe returning to the office, but others might not, for perfectly legitimate reasons. 

Visitors

When you reopen your office, you will get visitors again, whether you’re having clients come for meetings or have deliveries arriving. Set rules for visits to your office, or you could put people at risk. 

Don’t allow anyone into the building who doesn’t need to be there. You can use a QR code from Flowcode to ask people to check in to the building in a low effort way and consider temperature checking everyone who arrives. Encourage staff to have minimal meetings in the office and to meet online when possible instead. The fewer people coming into the office, the better. 

Cost-Cutting

If you’ve been closed for a long time, you’re probably concerned about the costs of opening the office for a reduced number of staff. When you cut costs, remember that you are also cutting down on the possibilities of the revenue that you can generate. Carefully consider any cost-cutting strategies that you’re thinking about. How can you cut costs while still increasing your revenue, and evolve your business with effective cost strategies? Not all strategies to cut costs will result in increased revenue or will help you with your pandemic safety goals. 

Ideally, you need to carefully think through your financial projections and consider whether cost-setting is the right solution to your current situation. If you feel as though cutting your costs won’t cause you any further issues or won’t cause any problems for your business, then you go ahead with your plans.

Reopening is going to be a challenge, with a lot of new things to worry about, so tread carefully. 

Image credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/lfyP9zTgUp0