A coalition of safety groups, businesses and government agencies, led by the National Safety Council, has released a framework for employers during re-opening in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The recommendations are from the SAFER (Safe Actions for Employee Returns) task force.
The six focus areas in the framework are:
- Physical environments: building maintenance, requiring physical distance among employees
- Medical issues: employee health monitoring, encouraging good hygiene and infection control
- Stress, emotional and mental health: methods to allay the anxieties workers may feel about their jobs when returning to work
- Employment and human resources: addressing the questions workers have about how the nature of their work may have changed in the last few months
- Communication needs: effective, timely and frequent communication about arriving back at work, and personnel and policy changes, and
- External considerations: how changes outside of an employer’s control need to be considered.
The NSC urges the U.S. Department of Labor to adopt the SAFER framework as part of its Opening America’s Workplaces Again national online dialogue.
SAFER launched with 48 member organizations and has added 18 more.
The group says it will focus on developing “playbooks” – instructions for how employers can come back into operations safely.
You can download SAFER’s initial framework summary here.
