Have you got a roadmap for returning to the office? With social distancing, enhanced cleaning, and home workers to consider, there’s a lot to do. We’ve put together three practical steps you can take for creating a smooth transition back into the office in a COVID-secure way.
Cleaning
Having a COVID-secure, enhanced cleaning process in place is vital for protecting the health of your staff and visitors. It’s important to consider how shared spaces are used to allow for touch point cleaning. It’s good practice to make hand sanitiser and washing stations available in all shared areas with clearly displayed posters encouraging staff to use them. If staff use company vehicles or are handling deliveries, the HSE recommends making hand sanitiser available to them as a priority.
After you’ve carried out a risk assessment you’ll need to design a cleaning regime that ensures all touch points and other areas are cleaned frequently. These areas include door handles, keyboards, shared equipment, and any other surfaces touched regularly by multiple members of staff throughout the day. It’s good practice to keep desks as clear as possible to allow regular cleaning to take place, which means having a good document management system in place is key.
Office Space
It’s important to create as much space as possible by clearing out clutter. This allows for effective cleaning and social distancing. If documentation is taking up space in your office, consider putting everything in secure storage and organising secure destruction for items that no longer need to be kept. Very often we keep office furniture for longer than we need to “just in case”. Now is a great time to have a thorough clear out so you can keep staff and visitors protected. If you’ve become ‘paperlite’ and need your files digitised our scanning services can help. We collect, prepare, scan, and index your documents for you, once the process is complete the hard copies can remain in storage, be returned or securely destroyed.
Once the space is clear it’s important to ensure social distancing measures are in place. At Archive-Vault we have floor markers reminding staff and visitors about social distancing and have placed posters throughout the office and warehouse highlighting the importance of handwashing, effective cleaning, and social distancing. We also use the Pathfindr Safe Distancing Assistants to maintain social distancing. The assistants sound an alarm or vibrate if staff get closer than 2 meters, they’ve been brilliant for keeping our staff safe. We’ve found that, when used in conjunction with our other measures, they are highly effective.
Document retention
If keeping on top of retention dates for your documents has slipped over lockdown, spend some time reviewing these and securely destroy any data you no longer need to keep. It’ll help you return to the office with a fresh start and will mean new documents aren’t adding to the backlog. Perhaps there is documentation that needs to be stored but you simply don’t have space for now that there are new measures to consider. If that’s the case we’d be happy to help. We can carry out a COVID-secure collection, bringing the documents into our facility and indexing them before putting them into storage.
If new documents are coming into the office with staff who have been working from home, your document management system needs to be able to cope with this. We suggest working with a secure storage and records management partner such as ourselves to ensure retention dates are being adhered to. There can be major consequences for not staying compliant, especially when files contain sensitive personal information about customers or staff.
We can help
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you create an effective roadmap back into the office, give us a call on 01603 720722 or email us info@archive-vault.co.uk.
