Ensuring You Have a COVID-Secure Construction Site

We have experienced some of the most unprecedented times over the past few months, and things aren’t going to go back to normal for a while now. As an employer in construction, you need to make sure that you are taking steps to ensure a safe and secure workplace on site. Not only will it help to keep your staff healthy and safe, but it will mean that planned projects can carry on as expected, and you’ll be able to do your part to minimize the spread of anything. Part and parcel of that are performing a risk assessment, to help you to be able to manage the risk of coronavirus within your business, and then you can give yourself a better idea of what you can do to help.

So with all of that in mind, here are some COVID safety guidelines to follow for your construction business, so that things can get back to some kind of new normality, and construction can carry on and your projects can get completed.

Make your workplace COVID-secure

You may have assessed if anyone can work from home as part of your returning to work risk assessment. There will be some people who could work from, but in construction, the majority of them are going to need to be on site. There are projects to build, as well as machinery that will need to be operated. As a result, you will need to think closely about the kind of changes that you will need to put into your workplace to reduce the risk and make it safe.

Social distancing

One of the first things to think about is social distancing. In many instances, it will be quite simple to keep workers two meters apart from each other. However, in some instances, it will be more difficult, but one meter distance should try to be maintained, with some other things in place. You might think about employees wearing masks if they have to get close to each other, for example.

Some other things that you can do to help social distancing are:

• Introducing a one-way system around the site, especially for entry and exit points as people will be coming and going at different times. Marking out points on the floor can be helpful, and a good reminder as there will be no excuses for ignorance
• Limit the movement of the team, which could be done through changing the shift rotas so that not everyone is working at the same time, if that would work with the projects that you have in place. You could also rotate the use of machinery and vehicles so that there is a chance for them to be cleaned down in-between. Limiting the movement could also be good for places like high-traffic areas like entryways or bathrooms
• Where possible, have people working together side by side, rather than face to face, especially if they have to get physically closer to each other. A small thing that can help reduce the spread of the virus.