4 Ways to Reduce Coughs Colds or the Flu Spreading in Your Office

During
the winter months, coughs, colds and flu can spread through your office pretty
fast, unless measures are put in place to reduce germs and infections. For
employers and managers, winter sicknesses mean more sick days, low morale, and
reduced productivity, all of which have negative impacts on your company’s
bottom-line. However, there are things you can do to mitigate the spread of
colds, flu’s and winter bugs. Here are 4 tips to reduce the spread of winter
sicknesses.

Encourage Hand Hygiene

Maintaining
good hand hygiene is the best way to curtail the spread of infections at the
office. We pick up germs on the surfaces we touch, and we can spread them when
we shake hands or when we share office equipment such as phones, keyboards, and
files or do things like open doors. You should encourage everyone in the office
to wash hands more thoroughly and more frequently. Some experts suggest putting
up posters with handwashing messages around the office, especially in the
bathroom.

You
should also provide hand sanitizing products in bathrooms, lunch rooms, and tea
rooms. You can even supply your employees with free wipes, tiny bottles of hand
sanitizer, and disinfecting sprays which they can keep at their working
stations.

Hygienic Cleaning Practices

The
office should be kept clean and sanitary throughout the year, but during the
winter, you should step up the cleaning effort because the stakes are much
higher. You can increase the focus on touch surfaces like door handles, taps,
handrails and the like.  If you clean and
disinfect your office more often, you kill more germs and reduce the
transmission of both airborne and direct contact infections.

To reduce the spread of germs it’s important that your commercial cleaner understands hygienic cleaning practices, and that in winter they pay more attention to the following areas:

The kitchen and breakroom. Shared equipment in the
office kitchen tend to harbour a lot of germs. Items and surfaces such as
coffee pot handle, microwave door handle, fridge door handle, table tops,
peanut butter jars, sugar containers etc. are handled by many people, so they
need to be wiped down with disinfectant or washed as often as possible.

Handles and buttons  Surfaces such as door handles, elevator
buttons, water dispenser buttons, filing cabinet handles etc. are touched by
almost everyone, so they should be disinfected several times during the day.

Electronics Shared electronics such
as phones, fax machines, copy machines, computer keyboards, headphones, and
earpieces, can act as conduits for the transmission of infections, so they
should be wiped down with disinfectant as well.

Bathrooms All surfaces in the bathroom that
come in contact with the skin must be cleaned and disinfected as often as
possible. These surfaces include the toilet seat, the flush handle, the faucet,
and the interior door handle of the bathroom.

Encourage Employees to Take Precautions

You
should motivate your employees to take precautions so as to reduce their
chances of contracting winter sicknesses. Encourage them to get themselves and
their family members vaccinated against the flu. You can even make it easier
for them to get vaccinated by bringing in a medic at the office, or by giving
them time off to go to the doctors and get a flu shot.

Encourage Sick Employees to Take Time
Off

The best way to prevent winter sickness from spreading is to keep the sick employees away from their healthy colleagues. That’s why it’s important to encourage sick employees to stay home, especially in the first few days when they are likely to be contagious. Some people feel they have to come in to keep their job, but when they are sick, especially in the early, more contagious stages, this is just a recipe for creating an office epidemic. If you really need to, you can always encourage ill people to get critical tasks done online if they can get access to your office systems via the internet.

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