The Quebec government has announced that various stores and services will gradually reopen during the month of June. Updates to your working environment and practices are essential to maintain the health of your customers, clients, visitors, and team. Is your business ready to welcome back the public?
You may be asking yourself how these preventative measures may affect your insurance. The answer is simple: if a customer, client, or employee contracts the virus at your work location, you may be civilly liable and may have to make use of your civil liability coverage.
Managing new sanitary measures may be complex due to the multitude of elements to be considered. A good starting point is to install plexiglass and wear masks. Here are some additional tips to reduce the chances of spreading the virus within your business:
At the entrance of your store or offices, your customers, clients and employees need to wash their hands. Set up a sink with soap for this purpose or install a hand sanitizer dispenser. It is also helpful to place them in various strategic areas that are frequented by most of the team (kitchen, doors that everyone needs to open inside the building, etc.). If you are looking for a local supplier, Groupe Triani and NOROI distillery are now manufacturing hand sanitizers to help out during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Place a well-protected employee (wearing a mask or visor, gloves, etc.) at the entrance to your building to make sure that those who enter
This applies to offices, construction sites, stores, and even restaurants. This employee can also control the number of customers or clients who enter your business at a time.
We also recommend that you keep a registry of individuals who enter your workplace. If someone were to be diagnosed with COVID-19, you would easily be able to contact all those who could have been in contact with this person and, therefore, reduce the spread of the virus.
As aisles are not generally that large, we recommend adding indicators regarding which direction to take, i.e. stickers on the ground or signs at eye level. Bud’s Sticker can help you make personalized signs. This way, you will ensure that people circulate in a safe way and that they maintain a distance of two metres from each other.
This same measure easily applies to offices. If more than one hallway leads from the front to the back of the building, you can implement a direction for each hallway.
If you have tools or items that customers or clients touch regularly, such as Interac terminals, be sure to disinfect them after each use, as grocers are currently doing with carts, terminals, and checkout conveyor belts.
If you work in an office, make sure that the entire building is cleaned at least daily. For common areas, such as the bathrooms and kitchen space, we suggest that they be disinfected two to three times a day.
Create break and lunch schedules to reduce points of contact between employees when they prepare their meals in the kitchen. Doing so will be easier to remain two metres apart from others.
To help businesses implement preventative safety measures, the CNESST prepared a COVID-19 kit. The following can be found on the CNESST website:
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If you have questions about the coverage available to you, or to learn more about how to manage the risk to which you may be exposed, feel free to contact your Lareau broker.
