What Every Employer Needs to Know About Covid-19 Duty of Care
As an employer, you have a duty of reasonable care towards your employees and their health and safety while at work. In this context, ‘reasonable care’ means that you need to assess any potential risks and their consequential harm to an employee, and implement safety precautions that either eliminate or minimise the risk as much as possible. But what does this mean in the time of Covid-19?
It’s an ever-changing landscape and the guidelines may change over the coming months but, in order to safely reopen, employers must know what to do to protect their staff now. The level of risk and potential transmission of Covid-19 varies depending on the work that an individual is undertaking.
Let’s start with the basics. In common law, the duty of care includes:
· A safe place to work
· Safe work equipment
· A safe system of work and work practices
· Personal protective equipment
Safety documents and training
When did you last update your safety documentation? As part of ensuring a safe place of work, all employers with over 5 employees must regularly review their risk assessments and document the controls in place to make sure they are working. Business are required to update their risk assessments and other safety documents when they’re no longer effective or valid or if there are changes in the workplace that could lead to new risks such as changes to staff, a process or equipment.
In order to do this properly, employers will need to consider the current scientific information about Covid-19 and update these regularly in line with any changes. Additionally, employees need to be updated as and when changes occur, so that they’re aware of current risks and the measures which they can adopt to minimise or eliminate the risks.
Employee health and safety training is another vital part of keeping employees safe at their place of work. This too will need to be updated in line with new requirements due to Covid-19, factoring in how and when to use personal protective equipment (PPE) and hand hygiene protocols.
Temporary changes to the workplace
To make workplaces suitable for employees to return, you’ll need decide to implement various controls. A main problem within most workplaces is allowing for social distancing between employees and, when applicable, customers.
Therefore, you should consider redesigning your workspace such as moving desks, erecting physical barriers and creating one-way systems using signs and floor markings. In spaces where these aren’t possible, employers may need to reduce the number of employees in a space through splitting breaks and shift times, encouraging a proportion of the work force to continue to work from home from the time being. At tested.me, we’re working hard to combat this problem through our digital health verification technology.
Risk assessments for those still working from home
While most people are preparing to return to their usual place of work, some employees may continue to work from home. While there is no need for a formal workstation assessment of an employee’s temporary working situation at home, if this workstation becomes a long-term solution an assessment is legally required.
In addition, employers should provide information to those working from home about the need for regular breaks, proper workstation set up and avoiding long periods of using display equipment. This means that you, as part of your employer duty of care, may need to consider your employees and how comfortable their current working from home situation is.
Covid-19 outbreak prevention
There are additional steps that an employer can introduce on their premises to minimise the risks of Covid-19 exposure to employees. Implementing temperature testing, in line with Public Health advice, can help reduce the likelihood that an infected individual can enter your premises.
Additionally, using a health verification software such as tested.me will seamlessly log visitors and employees who have entered the premises in line with GDPR. Our technology enables employers to easily identify who could have come in contact with an infected individual, helping to minimise the spread of Covid-19 any further, avoiding a second wave.
