Even in warehouses, your team members will have personal items they need to bring with them every day.

Coats, lunchboxes, sometimes even their own electronic devices like tablets or phones when needed – every team has personal effects that will come with them into the office. Even if these items aren’t company property, they still need to be provided secure storage to make sure nothing happens to them. Particularly in times of widespread illness or pandemic, secure storage of personal items can go a long way towards curbing the spread of disease throughout staff and keeping your team that much safer.

There’s a few steps you can take to help keep your employee’s belongings secure, and some of them may actually make your warehouse more convenient in the long run:

Personal belonging lockers: A lot of warehouses tend to provide a room somewhere with coat hangers and tables for workers to leave their personal belongings before getting ready to work on the shop floor. These common areas can become a hotbed of germs during illness seasons (as well as providing an easy target for theft by the less-scrupulous among your team), but a little separation can go a long way to prevent this.

Setting up industrial lockers in any of these common areas can help your team keep their personal goods tidy, organized, and secure. Even if the lockers are right next to each other, it can help prevent cross-contamination of surfaces and co-mingling of items belonging to a sick employee. Installing personal lockers in common areas can help you prevent the spread of disease and keep your entire team safer from contagious illness, as well as potential theft.

Shared equipment lockers: Similarly, for any warehouse tools and hand tools stored at the warehouse that are used by each employee during the day, equipment lockers can come in handy for keeping equipment separate and free of cross contamination. Find an area near the main warehouse floor that everyone can access, but far enough away from the personal lockers (to prevent the spread of germs), and set up some shared equipment lockers that your team can get to at the beginning and end of every shift. It’s also a good idea to provide some sanitization equipment near the lockers to help your team wipe down and disinfect anything they’re done using.

Germ-free shelving: If you don’t have room for lockers, or just want to add some extra storage space to a given area, the best thing to focus on is using germ-free materials for the storage in question. Sterile plastic shelving is a versatile and flexible way to add shelves to a room for smaller personal items that can help prevent germs from spreading throughout the building.

Private offices: One of the best ways to store items while keeping your employees safe is to designate a space of their own. By adding a warehouse office to the floor of your warehouse, you can create a separate area to keep things like tablets and RFID scanners, as well as personal effects for the office staff that may not have room where the picking and shipping staff keeps their supplies. (Having a separate private area like this can also encourage social distancing between workers on the floor and in the office, by giving them more distinct areas to work in.)