Managing Employee Health and Wellbeing
Not only can a surge of COVID (or any illness or situation that creates large scale absence) have the potential to increase workload significantly, it may also create additional stress and anxiety outside of work and impact employee health and wellbeing. Workers may have to consider child support, suffer increased financial pressures, or experience fear and anxiety about the disease itself.
Health-wise, individual responses to COVID will vary from those who have no symptoms to those who may become extremely sick. There are also the implications of longer-term health effects that may impact an employee’s return to the workplace.
It is not too soon to consider giving extra attention to specific health and wellbeing actions. Your staff, retention and regulators will thank you for them.
- Make sure your employees feel safe. Consider your workplace vaccination policy, do you have adequate PPE, ventilation, sanitation etc? Let your team know what you are doing to look after them while they are working.
- Consider what you ask an employee to do. For example, instead of meeting face-to-face with clients or the team, revert to those lockdown days and hold meetings virtually to minimise exposure to others.
- Carry out a risk assessment for employees working from home.
- Support employees in prioritising work so they do not become overwhelmed if they are picking up tasks from absent employees. Stress and burnout are hazards in your workplace and on the rise – Forbes recently reported that 94% of workers were stressed.
- Support employees to receive vaccination and booster shots.
- Make sure employees who have symptoms get tested and stay at home.
Don’t forget, you can always contact FixHR for help.
