Keeping employees safe when returning to work

At the beginning of May, Boris Johnson outlined the UK Government’s plans to enable certain businesses in England to start to reopen. Although employees who can work from home are encouraged to still do so, the official guidance on the government’s plans for us all to return to work are still emerging. 

There is sector-specific guidance for companies in the construction sector, labs and research facilities, offices and contact centres, warehouses and other similar environments. There is also other guidance for working in other people’s homes, food takeaways and deliveries, shops and others.

Here at Strip Curtains Direct, our policies and procedures have changed in order to ensure we are creating the safest environment for our employees - and our customers. We realised quite quickly that effective social distancing was key to our efforts to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 - as it means that all of our employees are at a safe range from each other.  But, it can be hard for people to gauge distance by sight, especially now that the guidance has changed (from July 4th 2020) to ask people to keep a distance of one metre from other people "when you can mitigate the risk by taking other precautions."

So, we introduced social distancing floor marking kits into our warehouse to help our employees to:

• Avoid non-essential contact with each other
• Keep a safe distance of at least two metres wherever possible
• Avoid physical contact

The government guidelines for social distancing recommend the following:

• A review of all work premises to identify suitable adaptations to support social distancing
• Office and workspaces set up to support social distancing, such as layout changes, appropriate signage, stickers and floor markings to denote safe distances and so on
• Workstations and desks should be arranged with a minimum separation between them - and screens fitted where necessary

In higher risk areas of the workplace they also recommend:

• Printing hand washing instructions/posters and displaying them throughout the workplace - especially in toilets
• Enabling safe queuing systems by use of room occupancy limits, floor marking signs, etc.

We found that our premium quality floor signs and posters worked so well that we wanted to be able to offer them to our customers as well to help them to work safely during and post lockdown. We have ten different kits available, containing a variety of floor markers with text or symbols, masking tape, feet, corner signals, magnetic frames, and more!

If you work in a supermarket, bank, hospital, pharmacy or retail store and you would like to order one of our social distancing kits, please call us on 0333 999 7171 or email info@stripcurtainsdirect.com