COVID Work Preparedness
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- Duration: 15 Minutes
- Publisher: Tourvest Travel Services Learning & Development.
- Ensure to complete the course quiz.
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. To reduce the impact of COVID-19 outbreak conditions on businesses, workers, customers, and the public, it is important for all employers to plan now for COVID-19. For employers who have already planned for influenza outbreaks involving many staff members, planning for COVID-19 may involve updating plans to address the specific exposure risks, sources of exposure, routes of transmission, and other unique characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 (i.e., compared to influenza virus outbreaks). Employers who have not prepared for pandemic events should prepare themselves and their workers as far in advance as possible of potentially worsening outbreak conditions. Lack of continuity planning can result in a cascade of failures as employers attempt to address challenges of COVID-19 with insufficient resources and workers who might not be adequately trained for jobs they may have to perform under pandemic conditions.
Annex A: Risk assessment
What is a risk assessment?
Risk assessment is the process of identifying and assessing the risks to your business and prioritising your resources to reduce or eliminate the most significant risks.
How to complete a COVID-19 business continuity risk assessment?
To complete a business continuity risk assessment, we need to establish the key characteristics of the business and consider how COVID-19 impacts upon these. This can be achieved via a series of considerations and questions including:
- Staff resources: Are staff required to be on-site and have direct face-to-face interaction with each other, customers, suppliers, hauliers etc.? What am I doing to protect them? Do staff need to handle cash/ documentation from customers? Do I have back up staff?
- Availability: Who are my key staff? Do they all work together simultaneously? Do they all need to be on-site? Could I stagger shifts? Can they work off-site?
- Inputs: Is my supply chain secure? How much raw material/stock do I have? Are my routes to market secure? Have my customers’ needs and expectations changed? Is our product format still acceptable?
- Recovery: What do I need to do in the event of someone on site identifying as sick? Do I have contact details of all staff/contacts? Can I close parts of my business and allow others to still function?
When considering such questions, we need to establish what the priorities are to maintain our business.
This can be achieved via risk assessment.
Risk assessment models
There are many models for risk assessment. The model below considers the Likelihood/Relevance and the Severity of the impact of the issue on the business. Those issues with the highest score are the most significant risks and justify the most significant attention.
Controls – Risk Mitigation
Controls should be implemented for the issues with the highest score (risk) and we should revisit the risk assessment to ascertain if the risk has been reduced, i.e. a reduction in the number (risk) associated with the specific issue. Controls could take the form of provision of sanitiser and PPE; Social distancing; Electronic shift handovers; Installation of barriers at interfaces; Implementation if different shift patterns; Staff working different shift patterns.
Documentation – Risk Register
Risk assessment can be documented in many different formats. The table below illustrates an example of one such format.