How Health and Safety in the Workplace Improved due to Covid-19 Restrictions

The world in which we live in has changed significantly in the last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. People have been quarantined in their home and some have been unable to work.   With the development of vaccines and a global deployment of these, hopefully there will be some level of normality soon, but will the world be the same as before?   There may never be the same normality as we previously knew and there also may never be the complete eradication of Covid-19. There have been some positive gains though in terms of what the vaccine has done for the business sector.  We list some of these below.

Stay at Home

With some people there has been a paradigm that people are not effective when they are working from home.  As such, some businesses have not allowed this. Through this pandemic, this has therefore been forced on some employers in order to actually continue operating.  We have had organisations that would have previously been operating in a large building as a call centre, now all working from home.   The productivity has potentially not decreased (and in some cases decreases) and the risk of an accident at work has then clearly reduced as people are in the comfort of their own home.

Training

Organisations have had to raise the bar quite significantly in terms of training their workforce in matters relating to health and safety, especially when it comes to hosting events.  There have been many event courses set up to support these initiatives.  Employers have had to re-assess what is safe and what is not, not only in terms of physical accidents but also preventing the spread of Covid-19.   This has seen things such as social distancing and the wearing of a face mask compulsory in some industries.   This may not be possible for all job types and as a result, risk assessments would be completed to see what other things could be done to minimise risk.

Culture

It is true to say that more people are now aware of Health and Safety and the importance of it and there have been some improvements in culture relating to this.   For example, if the workplace mandates the wearing of safety masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19, there are great examples of how this has been complied with but also how more people have confidence to challenge others that are non-compliant.   Business have had to take the health and safety of employees far more serious now more than ever before to protect from illness of even death.   As a direct consequence there has also been a decrease in work related accidents.

Summary

Covid-19 has made business think differently towards health and safety.  It may have previously been their number one priority but now more effort has had to go into this in order to ensure the reduction of Covid-19 spread.  Things may never get back to what we would have classed as “normal”.