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Safety of all forms is paramount in any warehouse, whether it’s protecting your workers from injury, keeping your products safe, or lessening the spread of illness.

A new focus has been placed on warehouse sanitation in these post-COVID days, and the greater awareness of how diseases can be transmitted has caused us all to take a good, long look at how to prevent contagious diseases in an area as vast as a warehouse.

However, in these discussions, most of the attention is – rightly – paid to the warehouse floor. Even with as important as inventory and picking is to a warehouse, there’s a whole other segment of warehouse operations taking place inside warehouse offices.

These spaces are equally important to the overall success and function of the warehouse, and the workers inside need to be given consideration to keep them safe as well. We’ve pulled together a few ways to keep your warehouse office staff safe from potential illness and infection:

 

Offer work-from-home schedules

Even as COVID-19 begins to subside, reducing the amount of staff inside the warehouse is going to play a huge role in preventing illness. For the near future, allow your workers to rotate in and out of working from home and working in the office to reduce the amount of people in the office at one time.

 

Sterilize everything

A lot of devices in a warehouse can get shared around and touched by multiple workers throughout the day. While the jury is still out on how fast COVID-19 can spread through surfaces, it’s best not to take the chance of spreading COVID or similar illnesses. Make sure any items that get shared, such as tablets, laptops, or even computer desks in the event that your warehouse doesn’t do assigned seating, are wiped down after each use and are sterilized at the end of each work day.

 

Keep employee areas separate

In the event that your employees do have assigned seating and their own spaces, try to enforce as much separation as you can. Use plexiglass partitions between areas if you can, make sure everyone sticks to their own assigned warehouse office furniture to lessen the risk of transmitted diseases. Even in a more open-plan area without a lot of divisions, giving everyone their own area without the need to share can cut down on cross-contamination.

 

Stagger shift starts and break times

A few of the ‘work besties’ on your team may be saddened to learn this, but it might be a good idea to start staggering breaks and shift starts to stop everyone from going on break, starting work, or leaving at the exact same time. This can prevent congestion in different areas such as the break room, as well as preventing a huge crowd from building up right outside the office when everyone’s shift starts at the same time. Even if everyone else has to find a new friend to go to lunch with, it’ll help your team a lot in the long run.

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