This month’s guest post is from Gail Lees who is responsible for Health & Safety at Filtermist. Before joining Filtermist in 2019 Gail spent 10 years as QSHE Manager at a Government research laboratory.

Here Gail outlines the changes we made to our workplace to adjust to the COVID restrictions and how things are now changing as life returns to a ‘new normal’.

“The biggest worry when it comes to health and safety is complacency, so if COVID has done anything it has pushed health and safety to the forefront of everyone’s minds.

“When COVID hit the UK in March 2020 like many other businesses we immediately asked those staff who could do so to work from home.  We reconfigured offices, removing desks and chairs to allow for the appropriate space and we introduced one-way systems, strict cleaning regimes, vehicle sharing guidance and a rota for using the canteen. We also implemented our own track and trace procedures so anyone coming on site had to advise me - allowing allocation of a workspace and a log to be kept as to where and when they were on site. We later introduced mask wearing in line with government advice.

“We have run our business at a significantly reduced capacity on site to follow government guidance, but to also ensure our duty of care to protect our staff and to keep them safe whilst at work.  At Filtermist – protecting our own people is always our priority. We had to be particularly cautious with our manufacturing staff who cannot work from home and where the risk of a COVID infection within the team could potentially shut our manufacturing down for two weeks.  Keeping the same level of service to our customers is paramount as we protect the future of the business.

“As a company we have a wealth of experience in carrying out risk assessments, not only for our own operations, but also at our customers sites to ensure our staff and customers are safe at all times.  In response to the pandemic, we were able to quickly respond and issue COVID specific risk assessments in April 2020.

“As restrictions are easing socially, we are as a business still following a lot of the policies implemented at the start of the pandemic and some will stay in place for the foreseeable future as our duty of care is to always protect our staff in the workplace.

“As the government plans to lift restrictions towards the end of June we are planning to return to our ‘new normal’ in September.  We will continue to follow government advice, but we have delayed our return until September to allow time to see how things go, to allow our staff to be fully vaccinated and to allow time for our employees to transition back into the workplace.  For some this will be the first time back into the office for 18 months and that brings big changes personally.  Our staff are already aware of this date so that they can plan and feel prepared for it.

“Our return to the office in September will be based on a hybrid model allowing both home and office working which will be decided based on role and personal requirements.  Working at home has worked well for many of our employees as it has allowed flexibility and a better work life balance - this is something we want to continue with which is why last October we implemented a flexible working and remote working policy.  This policy has partly been driven by COVID, but we recognise that flexible and remote working is the future of the modern workforce and our focus is always to ‘Get, Grow, Keep’ our employees. Offering options to facilitate a better work/life balance is just one way of helping us achieve this.”

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