Some organizations have been able to continue working during the COVID-19 pandemic "just" by having workers work from home. Sure, there were hiccups along the way as we all figured out online collaboration tools like Jira or Trello, messaging tools like Slack, and how to deal with Zoom fatigue, but for most organizations and workers, these COVID-related challenges were things we could handle (now, juggling that working from home while taking care of your kids and getting them to complete school from home at the same time is an issue for a different article).
But not all organizations could do that. For example, a lot of industrial or manufacturing organizations didn't have that kind of luxury. The same was true in the construction industry. No doubt you can think of other organizations that had to deal with COVID return-to-work issues in a more immediate, "we need to be at work together" kind of way.
OSHA recently published a COVID/Return to Work guidance, and that guidance includes 16 different elements employers should include in their COVID Prevention Plans. In the article below, we've linked you to the OSHA guidance, listed the 16 elements, and shown you how digital tools created by Vector Solutions can help your company implement each of them.
We wish you luck with your own COVID return-to-work program and are here to help if you've got any questions.
Digital Solutions to Help Your Return-to-Work Efforts During the COVID Pandemic
In their January 29, 2021 COVID guidance, OSHA recommends that employers create a COVID Workplace Prevention Plan with the following 16 elements:
Establish a single workplace coordinator for COVID issues
Identify where and how employees could get exposed to COVID while at work
Identify measures to help control the spread of COVID, keeping the hierarchy of controls in mind and realizing no single solution will solve the problem
Adding supportive policies and practices to help protect workers at high-risk
Creating a system for communicating with workers about COVID-19 issues
Educate and train workers about COVID-19 and the procedures and policies related to COVID-19 mitigation and control at your organization
Have workers who are sick, potentially sick, exposed, or potentially exposed to COVID isolate/quarantine
Put in place policies, procedures, and other actions to reduce the negative outcomes for workers who are isolating/quarantining
Isolate workers who show symptoms of COVID at work
Create enhanced cleaning and disinfecting procedures in case people who are positive or suspected to be positive enter your facility
Provide employees guidance on screening and testing for COVID-19
Record and report COVID infections and deaths to OSHA
Create a way for employees to raise concerns about COVID-19 anonymously and ensure there are protections for any worker who does raise concerns
Offer COVID-19 vaccinations freely to employees and provide training workers about the safety and benefits of vaccination
Once workers begin getting vaccinated, make no distinctions between workers who have been vaccinated and workers who have not and maintain the same sets of rules (masks, hand hygiene, physical distancing, etc.) for both sets of workers
Through our membership in the Vector Solutions family, we're proud to partner with LiveSafe, makers of a mobile risk communication & intelligence platform. LiveSafe has a COVID/Return-to-Work feature set known as WorkSafe that can help you organization with the following items from OSHA's guidance:
Assign a single workplace coordinator for COVID issues
WorkSafe won't assign this person for you, but you can use WorkSafe to specify this person as a COVID point of contact in the application, which makes it very easy for all employees to communicate with that single COVID point of contact.
Adding supportive policies and practices to help protect workers at high-risk
Again, it's up to your organization to create the policies and practices, but WorkSafe makes it easy to distribute them to workers and allows you to organize them in a way that employees can easily find and review them on their own.
Creating a system for communicating with workers about COVID-19 issues
WorkSafe is all about communication. Easy, safe, convenient, quick, trackable, and anonymous when necessary.
Educate and train workers about COVID-19 and the procedures and policies related to COVID-19 mitigation and control at your organization
While much of your safety and health training may be distributed through your LMS, you can use the WorkSafe mobile communication platform to push out timely COVID-related news, procedure changes, and so on.
Have workers who are sick, potentially sick, exposed, or potentially exposed to COVID isolate/quarantine
Once you've created policies along these lines, you can use WorkSafe to push these policies out to workers and inform them. Also, employees can use WorkSafe to report that they're infected or possibly infected without coming to work.
Put in place policies, procedures, and other actions to reduce the negative outcomes for workers who are isolating/quarantining
This is another case where it's up to your organization to create the policies and procedures but, once they're created, you can use WorkSafe to communicate these out to workers, supervisors, and managers.
Isolate workers who show symptoms of COVID at work
Use WorkSafe to communicate in advance to workers what they should do if they begin to feel ill at work and allow them to use WorkSafe to report sickness at work when possible symptoms first appear.
Provide employees guidance on screening and testing for COVID-19
Use WorkSafe to inform employees of your screening and testing policies but also to show them where, on a MAP, they can go for screening and testing.
Create a way for employees to raise concerns about COVID-19 anonymously and ensure there are protections for any worker who does raise concerns
WorkSafe comes with a "make this anonymous" reporting option so when employees do choose to raise an issue with your assigned COVID point of contact, that issue will arrive anonymously if the employee chooses that option.
Offer COVID-19 vaccinations freely to employees and provide training workers about the safety and benefits of vaccination
Use WorkSafe to inform workers of your vaccination policies and also to direct them to the location at which they can get vaccinated.
Once workers begin getting vaccinated, make no distinctions between workers who have been vaccinated and workers who have not and maintain the same sets of rules (masks, hand hygiene, physical distancing, etc.) for both sets of worker
Again, this comes down to using WorkSafe to distribute this policy out to workers, supervisors, and managers once you've created it.
Vector Solutions also includes yet another partner of ours, IndustrySafe. IndustrySafe makes the Vector EHS management software system you can use for JHAs, incident investigations, OSHA Reporting, and more. Vector EHS can help you with the following items from OSHA's 16-point guidance:
Identify where and how employees could get exposed to COVID while at work
Vector EHS includes a job safety analysis/job hazard analysis module to assist with COVID hazard identification.
Create enhanced cleaning and disinfecting procedures in case people who are positive or suspected to be positive enter your facility Vector EHS also includes a procedures module for creating and implementing new procedures, such as these for cleaning and disinfecting.
Record and report COVID infections and deaths to OSHA
At the heart of Vector EHS is the ability to record and report injury and illness data, including illness and fatality data for work-related COVID cases. This includes completing your OSHA 300 forms, annual online submission, EHS injury/illness/fatality data dashboards and analytics, and more.
Comply with other relevant OSHA standards
This is a broad point, so it's hard to get specific on how Vector EHS can help with this, but just as there's a lot to OSHA standards not covered in the COVID guidance, there's a lot to Vector EHS we haven't mentioned yet, too.
A new feature of our Vector EHS management software is a safety data sheet (SDS) management module. The Vector EHS Safety Data Sheet module can help you with the following elements from OSHA's COVID prevention plan list:
Create enhanced cleaning and disinfecting procedures in case people who are positive or suspected to be positive enter your facility
All of that cleaning and disinfecting may very well mean chemicals that fall under OSHA's Haz-Com standard. And that means you'll need safety data sheets (SDS) and will have to give employees access them. Vector SDS can help with this.
Online Health & Safety Training Courses & Learning Management System (LMS)
Finally, Vector Solutions makes a learning management system (LMS) for training management and administration and online safety and health courses to further assist you with your safety and health training needs. The Vector Solutions LMS and online safety and health training courses can help your organization with the following elements of the 16-point COVID prevention plan list from OSHA:
Identify measures to help control the spread of COVID, keeping the hierarchy of controls in mind and realizing no single solution will solve the problem
Although health and safety training shouldn't be your primary control, it's likely to be one element in that combination OSHA mentions.
Creating a system for communicating with workers about COVID-19 issues
Your organization can use the Vector learning management system (along with WorkSafe) for communicating with employees around COVID.
Educate and train workers about COVID-19 and the procedures and policies related to COVID-19 mitigation and control at your organization
Use our online COVID health and safety training courses for training workers on the basis of COVID, and create your own training materials for organization-specific training on COVID. PLUS, deliver and track that training with our LMS.
Have workers who are sick, potentially sick, exposed, or potentially exposed to COVID isolate/quarantine
Include this point in your health and safety training.
Create enhanced cleaning and disinfecting procedures in case people who are positive or suspected to be positive enter your facility
Your workers will need to know about your new cleaning and disinfecting policies; will need to know their roles in those new policies; and will most likely need some additional Haz-Com training as well.
Provide employees guidance on screening and testing for COVID-19
Finally, use our online health and safety training courses and tools to teach employees about the purpose and safety of the vaccines, how and when to get vaccinated, and more.
Conclusion: Let Vector Solutions Help Your Organization Mitigate COVID Risks and Get To Work (Safely)
We're all in this pandemic together until we're all out of it, so we hope you found this article helpful for your return-to-work efforts whether you're interested in getting any of the software tools we've mentioned above or not.
That said, if you ARE interested in one or more of our software solutions (or the online safety and health training courses), please contact us and we'll be happy to help you determine if they're the right fits for your needs.
Before you go, don't forget to download the Return to Work/COVID checklist immediately below!
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