COVER STORY


EMPLOYEE WELFARE: SUPPORTING YOUR PEOPLE


What can businesses do to soften the impact of COVID-19 on employees and support them with their daily challenges? Here, Nina Wyers, Marketing and Brand Director of The Floorbrite Group, looks at the solutions available in the months ahead.


There is no one in the world that can say 2020 has been a walk in the park. If they did, they would be lying.


From worry and fear, to sickness, the loss of loved ones, panic buying, isolation, working from home, not working from home, redundancy, businesses collapsing, and the inevitable yet massively underestimated toll on mental health, we have all experienced struggles of some kind.


What can we do to soften the impact of COVID-19 on our employees? What can we do to ease their fears at work and support them with their daily challenges so they can provide for their families and function well in their job roles?


Being a cleaning service provider, we must talk about increased hygiene in the workplace as a necessity to mitigate the threat and fears of COVID-19. However, as an employer of 1600 people, we can also offer our experience and the ideas currently helping our team in other areas too.


Hygiene in the workplace Back to basics. Your cleaning regime must be visible. Are you providing hand sanitiser and placing visual reminders about hand hygiene and social distancing guidance around your premises? Communicate the daily cleaning schedule to your team so they have confidence in returning to the workplace.


Are you providing additional cleaning throughout the day to high touch point areas like door handles, push plates, handrails, washrooms and canteen areas? Are your cleaning teams using additional virucidal chemicals? If so, it would be worth communicating these points.


If you have a confirmed case on site, how is this being managed? From isolating those close contact staff to decontaminating and sanitising the affected areas, do you have a plan to safeguard the remaining employees on site?


Managing remote working In March 2020, the novelty of working from home for those normally based in the office might have been appealing for a short time. No commute to work; extra time to spend with the children; and virtual meetings in jogging bottoms. Nonetheless, for some the novelty has worn off and created additional issues to deal with. The lack of a daily chat with colleagues in the canteen or catch-up meeting over a coffee is impacting many people’s lives.


As the countries regions are currently dealing with shifting lockdown tiers, many larger businesses in the office sector are not returning to their workplaces until 2021. Many others though, have returned and like us, have adopted a hybrid scenario to maintain their business function and culture. Working part time in the office and part time from home to ensure adequate social distancing levels can be maintained in the workplace. We have found this option an acceptable balance.


Yet how are those employees in other businesses expected to cope until 2021, with what could be a full 12 months working from home without a choice?


During the national lockdown, our departmental heads had, and continue to have, regular group virtual meetings with their


14 Tomorrow’s FM Yearbook 2021/22


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