Opening businesses safely

With non-essential shops allowed to re-open in England from next Monday, the 15^th June, we are certain that business owners all over the country will be diligently trying to make their workplaces as safe for their employees as possible.

General government guidelines suggest that where possible employees should still work from home. If that is not possible, then a 2m distance must be maintained.

If that is not possible either, because of the nature of the work or the size and style of your premises, then you should make an effort to minimise the distance between employees. The government suggests:

“putting barriers in shared spaces, creating workplace shift patterns or fixed teams minimising the number of people in contact with one another, or ensuring colleagues are facing away from each other.”

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-guidance-launched-to-help-get-brits-safely-back-to-work

This is in order to minimise the risk of airborne transmission of COVID19 through droplets caused by actions like coughing or sneezing.

Here at Time and Attendance UK, our software can help you to plan and monitor different shift patterns. This means that you can create fixed or flexible shift patterns which stagger shift start/end times to reduce crowding.

If you want to alternate staff members in and out of the workplace, you can use our shift assignment screens to roster staff based on skills and headcounts. The software will advise if you will drop below your preferred level of cover.

Another time of day where crowding can become an issue is break and lunch times. You can use our software to monitor break patterns.

The government also advises that office workplaces should limit “visitor times to a specific time window and restrict access to required visitors only.”

This is easy to control using our visitor monitoring system, where visitors can check in for their pre-arranged appointments. This does require the use of a touchscreen to check in and out, so hand-washing facilities or sanitiser dispensers should be provided.

This is in order to minimise the spread of COVID19 through fomite transmission – which is the touching of any surface or object which has been contaminated by virus droplets. The exact degree of virus survival of various materials is still being studied, but the problem is easily avoided by good hygiene practises or avoiding any contact at all.

If you are following government guidelines to minimise usage of or provide alternatives to touchscreens or keypads in areas such as access control and biometric attendance management, then we can help here at Time and Attendance UK.

Our smartcards are contactless, using radio frequency technology, and don’t even need to be removed from their pocket or wallet to be read by the clocking machine.

Our Self Service Module allows employees to clock in and out quickly and reliably using either their mobile phone or their normal internet browser.

These methods still involve some contact between fingers and screen or computer mouse, but only by one individual per day. Therefore, the objects only need cleaned when one person clocks in and out, rather than one biometric machine needing to be cleaned every single time that all the employees use it.

For more information on our workplace management software, the additional SSM module or the smartcard hardware option, please get in touch.

We provide online product demos, as well as online training once products are purchased, and our engineers follow a strict social distancing policy.