How We’re Bouncing Back to the Office Safely
Since March 17th, the Trampoline team has been practicing good business distancing and working from home. This has meant setting up at-home offices and adapting to a new “normal.” Now as restrictions are lifting, we are faced with a new, more encouraging challenge: planning and preparing for a safe and responsible return to our office in downtown Halifax.
We are experts in branding. Not so much in public health. But our team has made sure to stay informed and up-to-date on the latest information provided by industry experts and government bodies to inform our decision making. As we look forward to helping more organizations “bounce back” from the impact of COVID-19, we have also prepared ourselves to do the same.
Armed with information from Dr. Alan Hedge, a world-renowned ergonomics and indoor environmental design expert, along with information from the government of Nova Scotia, we’ve prepared, what we’re calling, a “Home to Hollis” plan — which hinges on a 3-step approach:
Step 1: Build a Bounce Back team and gather input
We created a committee to plan, review and launch our return to work plan. Consisting of HR, PR, admin, and our executive team, we worked together to execute the planning before employees return to the office. All department heads were brought in to ensure their employees were comfortable and kept in the loop 100% through development and execution of our return.
Step 2: Develop a tactics list — ours includes
- Manage routes: we created routes around the office for our teams to take depending on what area of the office they work in.
- Manage equipment: we increased the cleaning of workstations and work equipment like printers, coffee machines, etc.
- Manage thresholds: we’ve limited the number of people within the elevator and have controlled access to our office. We also have sanitation stations at each entrance.
- Manage Airborne transmission: we have changed seating arrangements to ensure employees are 6 feet apart while working and are also supplying masks.
- Manage cleaning: we are increasing cleaning to include sanitation of all high touch surfaces to after use and for personal high touch surfaces like keyboards and desk to twice daily.
- Screening employees: we are asking employees to monitor their health daily and referring any cases to 811/Public health.
Step 3: Adapting our space
We are lucky to have so much space and were able to spread out our employees within our office, ensuring we are all socially distancing and adhering to public health measures. We minimized our lunch tables to limit number of people in one area, and limited meeting room capacities. However, knowing every situation is different, we are also allowing folks to continue to work at home until they are able, or comfortable, to return.
As our team returns to Hollis St, we continue to take an agile approach to our plan, as things are constantly changing. After all, bouncing back from what we’ve been through isn’t as easy as a 3-step plan! Just like how we would approach any project, we’ll plan, execute, monitor, and optimize to make sure we’re adapting as things change.
