The coronavirus pandemic has forced many businesses to make adjustments to their daily operations. Taking temperatures daily, wearing masks, more frequent sanitization, and social distancing are the orders of the day in an attempt to reduce the spread of the illness. Of course, enforcing things like social distancing can be somewhat tricky, despite having ample space to spread out in. Here are some things you can do to help.
Physical Barriers
If your warehouse has individual workstations designated for specific employees, you may find it useful to erect physical barriers between them. This can help promote social distancing by ensuring that workspaces aren’t too close together. Barriers can also encourage the people using the workspaces to stay in their workspace and not wander over to others. Of course, visibility may still be an important factor, so it may be best to use clear plexiglass or another similar material as a barrier. For best results, clean and maintain the barriers properly and avoid having employees swap workstations.
Floor Signs
Remembering to stand six feet apart from one another can be difficult in the midst of day to day operations, especially if the job requires a lot of moving around. Floor signs can serve as an excellent visual reminder to stay six feet apart and help people understand how far six feet is. If you already have various floor signs in your warehouse, adding more could get confusing. Color coding them can help reduce or eliminate that confusion. You should keep some things in mind when devising a color system for your floors signs. Some colors have designated meanings already, so social distancing floor signs may need to be a different color.
Practice What You Preach
As a leader and business owner, employees will be looking to you for guidance on how to act. If you want them to take social distancing guidelines seriously, then you need to as well. Hold yourself to the same standard as your employees. They will notice if you don’t. If you notice employees not taking social distancing seriously, you may need to have a talk about it with them. Make sure they clearly understand the expectations and policies, as well as the consequences of continuing to disregard them.
Enforcing social distancing in your warehouse is an important measure to take to help reduce the spread of illness. Implementing physical barriers and floor signs can be helpful visual reminders to keep an appropriate distance between people. Just as importantly, make sure that you as the business owner practice what you preach. This may not eliminate the spread of illness, but it should help to slow it down.
Read this next: How to Streamline Operations at Your Growing Business