How Safety Can Protect and Engage Essential Employees

Safety is a workplace imperative. Right now, those safety protocols look a little different than usual: from enforcing social distancing and metering capacities to providing protective gear and beyond.Read these 5 guidelines for building and maintaining a safe workplace:

1. 1. Follow and share local regulations. Check in daily on changes to recommendations and regulations about how essential businesses should operate. Be transparent with your team so that they can feel prepared and empowered early and often.

1. 2. Forgive distractions. Understand that, even though these frontline workers are reporting for duty physically each day, their minds might be at home with their family, worrying about their health, safety and well-being. Ask employees to take breaks more frequently and encourage them to hold off on dangerous tasks if they are distracted.

1. 3. Hear from your employees. Ask your team how safe and protected they feel. Automate and anonymize this process if you’d like, using a tool like Butterfly. Send them regular pulse surveys, where they can rate how supported they feel by management as well as how happy they are that day.

1. 4. Change the pace of work. Based on feedback and observation, it might be necessary to adjust expectations and processes in the workplace. Maybe employees will need to work shorter shifts or rotate job stations more frequently. Instead of measuring productivity by quantity, look at quality.

1. 5. Take care of your team. Make sure that they feel supported. Acknowledge their feedback so that they know they have been heard. If a team member gets sick, assure them that they will be paid for sick time while quarantined. Additionally, address the situation calmly with the people that they work closely with day-to-day.

The best way to create a safe working environment is to create supportive relationships with your employees. Approach the situation with an air of understanding and care. When a team feels supported, they will be more apt to pay attention to and abide by safety protocols.Butterfly was built for the frontline workforce, offering deskless teams a way to check in and share actionable feedback with ease. We want to help you engage your essential workforce so that they can work effectively and safely, today and in the future.To do that, we are offering access to our industry-leading engagement and communication tools, built especially for the frontline workforce, totally free for 90 days. Get in touch and we will set you up.