Your office checklist for winter season

Winter weather makes your home life challenging and your work life even more so. Most office workers dread driving to work on icy roads or trying to juggle the unexpected issues that an unexpected school closing has on their work schedules. That being the case, the best way to ride out the winter is to have a plan in place for your office. Below, you’ll find a checklist of things you need to do to prepare your office for winter.

Sidewalks and Floors

Icy sidewalks and wet floors present a falling hazard. To avoid these issues, keep the sidewalks shoveled and put rock salt down. As for your floors inside, if they’re linoleum, concrete, or some other material, make sure you keep them mopped and dry. Put up “wet floor” signs to remind people of the danger.

Finally, buy an inexpensive rug to put at the door. People can kick some ice and snow off their boots before they come into the building, keeping your floors drier.

Determine Your Risks

It’s important to look at all the possible risks you and your employees could run into once the snows fall before it actually starts falling. There are a couple of things you need to know to make a realistic assessment of this.

First, if you have work trucks, make sure that they’re winterized and that issues like nearly bald tires get corrected. You also want to determine how attentive city workers are about getting the roads cleared.

Additionally, you may consider putting emergency supplies in both your work trucks and in your office. These can include blankets, flares, dried food, bottles of water, and first aid kits. Encourage your employees to do the same in their own vehicles. If you have employees who work on the road, put a lone worker safety plan in place that’s winter-specific.

Finally, you’ll want to take a quick look at the weather at the end of each workday. If snow or freezing rain is coming the next day, plan accordingly.

Keep Sickness at Bay

For many people, winter equals cold and flu season. In an office setting, so many people are crammed together in a space, making contact with cold and flu bugs inevitable. To sidestep this issue, keep items like hand sanitizer, tissues, and even an assortment of different therapeutic teas in the office kitchen.

While it’s tempting to ask people to work when they’re sick, it’s best to encourage sick employees to stay home. They’ll only infect the reset of your crew, making you even more shorthanded in the end.

Tap Into Social Networks

Keeping your customers and your employees informed about changes in your work hours or other important matters helps you to keep everyone safe. To provide up-to-the-minute information for those who rely on you, tap into social media and mobile apps to inform people of any issues or schedule changes. You can also send out alerts if you must cancel appointments or if you must close early.

Additionally, you must choose some go-to people, who will handle winter emergency issues, like accidents or delayed shipments. These are your first-contact people: They could be department heads or someone you’ve chosen specifically for this job.

When you’re setting up your winter communication systems make sure that these people’s names are on your social media pages, your website, your app, etc.

Allow People to Work From Home

Unless you own a business that requires employees to work on-site, like a restaurant, then consider letting people work from home during the winter. This alleviates many dangers that people run into during the winter, including car wrecks and falls on the ice.

If you do adopt a work-from-home strategy, make sure that the employees who are working out of the office have a protocol to follow. This may require you to provide training for them before they start working at home. Do this before the winter weather strikes. This guarantees that your employees are ready to hit the ground running should the winter weather keep them at home for the day.

Providing winter safety protocols protects you, your employees, and your business. While some winter-related issues hit you out of the blue, most of the time, these events are not entirely unexpected, given the season. As such, it’s best to create a winter-weather protocol before the winter snows come.

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