Health and safety expert says employers must proceed with extreme caution
As Ontario moves into the next stage of its reopening plan, thoughts are now turning to how businesses can safely reopen.
“The provision that required employees to work from home where possible has been removed from the legislation in Step Three. However, that doesn’t mean that you can fully reopen your office without any caution,” says Catherine Bergeron, Health and Safety Team Lead, Peninsula Canada.
Despite this new assumption, “businesses must proceed with extreme caution for reopening,” she says.
Bergeron says that the first thing that she would advise is that employers do a risk assessment to understand what hazards lay ahead, especially given Omicron spreads a lot faster than any other variant. "It’s really important to double the efforts and proceed cautiously,” she says.
This means, for example, not bringing all your employees back at once.
“Starting at 25 per cent capacity, and if it goes well after two or three weeks then you can increase the capacity little by little. Having a staggered approach, to evaluate each step and how things are going is probably the safest approach.”
Workplace safety plan
Under COVID, Ontario requires businesses to have a written workplace safety plan.
“There’s a lot of things to consider in a safety plan, it’s going to depend on the type of business you’re in,” says Bergeron. “But essentially, what you want to see in a COVID-19 safety plan is everything that you’re doing to prevent the risks.”
For example, if you’re choosing to stagger start times to make sure elevators aren’t crowded in the morning, you should put that in your safety plan.
Other things to include are your policy on masking requirements, what you’re doing to ensure physical distancing in the workspace (e.g. partitions in between desks).
“Everything that you do to keep your business safe should really be specified in your business plan so that anyone who comes into your workplace can understand what you do to keep your business safe,” says Bergeron. And it is also important to communicate this plan with employees, so they can know what is being done to keep them safe.
Screening
COVID screening is mandatory for every employer right now in Ontario, says Bergeron. And there are two types of screening, active and passive.
Passive screening is most common in retail where, for example, if you go into a convenience store there will be a poster on the front saying to not enter if you have COVID symptoms.
“As an employer, you have to actively screen all of our employees every day coming to work,” says Bergeron.
What this entails is tracking employees and having records of their presence (or absence) from work.
“Either you have someone asking those questions verbally and noting it down, or some employers will choose to have an app where employees have to monitor [themselves] and confirm that don’t have symptoms that day,” she says.
“However you decide to do it, it needs to be recorded.”
Vaccine policy
Most employers in Ontario are required to have a COVID-19 vaccine policy in place, says Bergeron.
There are three options with the policy:
“Your first choice is just to encourage your employees to get the vaccine through your policy. Your second choice would be request your employees to give you their vaccination status – not necessarily requiring them to get the vaccine, but just to keep the employer updated,” says Bergeron.
The third option is to mandate that every employee be vaccinated. In some industries such as health care, this is widespread.
With this type of policy, employers need to decide what the consequences will be if an employee refuses to get vaccinated. This could be on the lesser end, such as asking workers to take an informational course on COVID vaccination. Some employers may choose to reassign workers to a different worksite because their job is at a high risk for COVID. On the more severe side, employees who refuse to comply with a vaccine mandate may be let go.
And it's strongly advised that you seek legal counsel before you choose your COVID policy, says Bergeron.
Ultimately: “Make it absolutely clear to all your employees that you have a zero tolerance policy for anyone coming into the workplace with COVID, with Omicron spreading extremely fast,” says Bergeron. “And don’t make it a taboo [to talk about COVID], your employees should be comfortable having that conversation with their manager, and not being scared of reprisal if they’re asking to work from home because they’re having symptoms.”