Returning to work during the Coronavirus pandemic can be a source of anxiety and concern. However, with advanced cleaning and disinfection programs along with proper social distancing practices, you can increase the level of safety for building occupants.

Bennett Building Services is working with a number of our clients to help promote a clean, safe, and healthy environment in their facilities. We’re constantly working to educate our clients and their building occupants on the building best practices to help increase building safety.

How to Keep your Employees Safe

It is important to have a plan for safely returning to your workplace. Introducing new safety measures is the best way to prevent the spread of the virus around your workplace.

1. Promote Social Distancing: The virus is transmittable through personal contact, it is imperative to keep a safe 6 ft to reduce the virus's ability to spread.
2. Wearing Masks: The use of masks in the workplace, while not ideal, goes a long way to slowing the spread. Covid-19, like the common cold is spread by droplets generated in coughs and sneezes. Wearing masks greatly reduces the range and quantity of these droplets.
3. Cleaning and Disinfecting High Traffic Touch Points
1. The virus can live on surfaces up to 7 days, that’s why it is important to uphold a disinfection regimen for your workplace
2. Surfaces of note being doorknobs, light switches, lunch tables, kitchen appliances, copiers and phones.
4. Routinely Checking Your Employees
1. While testing still isn’t as widespread as we’d like, there are ways to assess risk when it comes to allowing employees into the workplace.
1. Check Temperature: while having a fever doesn’t necessarily equate to having the virus, it’s an easy way spot potential carriers
2. Know where your employees are coming from: Some employees may come from another county where there are more confirmed cases

While there is no cure-all solution to stop COVID-19 from reaching your workplace, these measures can help ensure it doesn’t cause further trouble if and when it does.

How to Clean and Disinfect your own office

Cleaning and Disinfecting high traffic touch points in your workplace is a strong measure to prevent the spread of the virus. Here’s a step by step procedure for do-it yourself disinfecting of hard surfaces.

1. Make sure to wear disposable gloves before using any chemicals
2. Clean surface you wish to disinfect with soap or detergent
3. The CDC recommends using a diluted bleach solution, to do this mix 5 tablespoons of bleach to 1 gallon of room temperature water or 4 teaspoons of bleach to 1 quart of room temperature water (This solution is effective for 24 hours)
4. Apply solution to a clean surface
5. Allow solution to sit for at least 1 minute before wiping it up. Allowing the solution to air dry is also acceptable as long as there is proper ventilation
6. Safely store away and chemical
7. Remove gloves and wash hands thoroughly

Give Bennett Building Services a call today to learn more about our tailored disinfection programs and all the ways we can help to make your building cleaner, greener and healthier.

Additional Resources

Sourcing for this post comes from several national and world leaders in health and epidemiology. Please reference these for a more comprehensive search into COVID-19 response.

OSHA- Guidance on preparing workplaces for COVID-19

https://www.osha.gov/Publications/OSHA3990.pdf

World Health Organization- Getting your workplace ready for COVID-19

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/advice-for-workplace-clean-19-03-2020.pdf