Protecting your retail staff with retail PPE this Christmas is essential as COVID-19 cases continue to be recorded in large numbers on a daily basis. Retail covers a broad range of businesses and shops, supermarkets, banks, building societies, post offices, department stores, and estate agents all fall within this business category and will undoubtedly be busier in the run-up to Christmas.
Your business can protect your frontline workers by supplying crucial safety products and workwear. Alongside providing personal protective equipment, your retail PPE equipment may include transparent partitions to protect customers and staff with a physical barrier.
The most recent retail PPE guidelines should be adhered to. Your business should encourage its staff to regularly clean surfaces that are touched often and provide and ask customers and employees to wash their hands frequently and use hand sanitiser.
Additional measures that will help you employees manage the risks of COVID-19 in the workplace include limiting the handling of stock and asking workers to work side-to-side or back-to-back.
High Quality PPE
Alongside ensuring social distancing and improving ventilation through measures such as keeping windows and doors open, there are a number of actions you can take to protect your staff during the Christmas shopping period.
The law has changed, and retail staff must wear a face covering when working in a customer facing area. Wearing a face mask or face shield in enclosed spaces is essential, and in some circumstances, using hand protection such as gloves can also be beneficial.
Where your COVID-19 risk assessment indicates that personal protective equipment is advantageous, you must supply retail PPE to your staff free of charge. Staff should change their face covering daily. To meet these supply demands, you can use a workwear scheme to simplify the process.
You should also ensure that your workers know how to put on and take off retail PPE safely.
Workwear
Workwear plays a vital role in representing your corporate image. As well as creating the right image, clean workwear and retail PPE can play a further role in-store.
Customers will identify your workers as staff and understand that requests to keep social distancing, to leave space while queuing, and to follow floor markings are coming from an official store representative and not another customer.
It helps staff to understand the importance of using their workwear if you effectively communicate why you are asking your team to use retail PPE. Part of this good communication practice should include providing regular updates so that employees realise that the wearing of PPE is still a requirement, and these and other measures are still enforced.
If you are searching for PPE equipment suppliers, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Lindstrom for further guidance and advice.