The Critical Role Of Risk Management In Preserving Employee Safety

The 6 essential elements to developing a business continuity and employee safety plan

All across the country and the world, the task of reopening and bringing employees back to physical locations is increasingly complicated by new COVID hot spots. Preserving business operations and keeping employees and customers safe is becoming an increasingly difficult task. Add to that a potentially more significant second wave in the fall, Human Resource professionals - who often lead the return to work cross-functional team - have their work cut out for them. They are faced with becoming Risk Managers overnight. 

What happens if you can’t keep employees and customers safe? The lawsuits have already begun. Any customer can claim negligence of any corporation for failing to provide evidence of adequate enforcement of their return to work policy and local, state, or federal guidelines. Compounding this risk, shareholders have been shown to be not far behind in seeking protections from the fallout of this negligence. Paper visitor logs and employee temperature records won’t cut it - a sound enterprise risk management strategy is required. 

The 6 categories below are essential elements to developing a business continuity and employee safety plan; both the near term and accounting for continued business disruptions coming:

Risk Assessment 

Each company needs to consider its unique circumstances through a risk assessment to determine the possible impacts of a 2nd wave of the virus. Identifying and assessing risks to the organization from different root-cause perspectives is the 1st step toward building a risk mitigation plan. Mobilize a cross-functional team of experts, with the mission of identifying all vulnerabilities. Pose these questions:
 

Identify all control measures that the organization has put in place to manage and mitigate the risk of the virus. It must include information about who will monitor these control activities, and how, to ensure that stakeholders are following specified policies at all locations. Publish the details to demonstrate that you take the health of your workers, customers and broader community seriously.

With jurisdiction requirements changing in a fluid manner as states experience set-backs, it is critical to maintain a library of guidelines to help you comply with federal, state, city and agency jurisdictional requirements. These requirements must also be incorporated into your own internal policy and facility considerations. Commercially reasonable mitigation and monitoring and company policy templates are also needed to help you keep your employees, customers and vendors safe while maintaining evidence of your compliance in each of the jurisdictions you operate in.

If customers and employees are returning to physical office and branch locations, implement and sustain your employee screening plans for both physical and mental health. Consider policies that address child care, underlying conditions, relocation tax reporting or simply fear of return without violating discrimination, privacy, tax or employment laws. It is also important to automate the process. Leverage an encrypted webform to collect employee COVID positive test information with routing rules and workflows. This will ensure compliance with privacy laws on Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Personal Health Information (PHI) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.

If you are not returning to physical locations immediately and you’re considering shift work, flex work or remaining fully remote, building the infrastructure for operating in your chosen model is critical. Remember to stay flexible; plan ahead for risks associated with the 2nd wave and the potential need to pivot to another model due to increased infections. Develop a process to manage real-time resource reallocation needs due to sickness outages and positive test results. It will be crucial to automate cross-department and cross-facility approvals. Be sure to coordinate shift work, flexible work arrangements, new employee onboarding and training and redeployment of employees.

Paper or emailed incident reporting and entry logs will not cover you from being found guilty of negligence should you be accused of not sufficiently protecting employees or customers. Software can be leveraged to schedule reservation times online before on-site visits. This will allow you to limit vendor and customer interaction to maintain social distancing. It will also establish a clear customer agreement with your safety policies.  You can also leverage software to collect entry log requirements for when contact tracing needs to be conducted.

Finally, once workplace safety procedures are developed and rolled out, it’s critical to set up a process to collect evidence that they are being conducted equally and at all locations. This may include taking records of daily workplace sanitation, employee attestations of workplace policies, evidence of social distancing being followed, inventory management and distribution of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE).