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As coronavirus sweeps across the UK and around the globe, enforced social distancing is causing consumers’ purchasing habits to naturally shift to shopping online. However, buying products through ecommerce sites doesn’t necessarily mean consumers are risk-free, as reports are now showing that the COVID-19 virus can stay viable on surfaces for up to 3 days.
With this in mind, ensuring your ecommerce operations are adhering to best practice protocol when it comes to hygiene and safety will all go towards minimising the risk of exposure to the virus, as well as offering vital reassurance to customers. In today’s post, therefore, we’ll be walking you through the appropriate measures your online business can take to ensure you’re doing all you can to reduce the risks to both your staff and consumers.
Brief your staff
If you haven’t already, it’s essential that you clearly communicate new health and safety processes to all staff members across the supply chain in light of the coronavirus outbreak. Whether they’re in the warehouse picking products off the shelves or operating last-mile delivery, stress how important it is for them to adhere to these new procedures to protect themselves, as well as customers - particularly those in the most vulnerable demographics.
As part of your briefing strategy, you should supply all staff with protective gloves and masks to be worn during working hours. In addition, educate them on the importance of vigilant personal hygiene with routine hand washing and regularly cleaning work stations to maintain high sanitary conditions.
You should also put a system in place to regularly check in with staff to ensure they know the right steps to take in regards to self-isolating if they either begin to display any of the coronavirus symptoms themselves, or suspect they may have come into contact with someone who has it.
Practice social distancing
While many companies are operating remotely, for those businesses operating on an online basis that are still able to fulfill orders, it can be a challenge to implement social distancing in all departments.
So, where possible, you should look to adapt your workspace to ensure minimal contact between employees. This could mean staggering break times to minimise the number of people gathering in the break room at any one time or redesigning work areas to provide more space between staff members.
While these measures may seem extreme, it’s important to remember that they’re only temporary and ultimately these things need to be considered in order to keep both your workforce and your customers safe and healthy.
Consider your packaging and delivery process
Taking the right level of precautions with staff wearing gloves, protective masks and regularly washing hands throughout the packaging process will naturally lower the chances of exposure across the supply chain. However, you should also reassess your packaging supplies and delivery processes, too.
With the above mentioned report suggesting that the virus can remain viable and infectious on plastic for up to 3 days, reducing the amount used to wrap products could go towards lowering the potential risks of transferring the virus.
When it comes to delivery, ensuring delivery personnel avoid direct contact with consumers is paramount, so be sure to communicate the measures you’re taking with consumers when it comes to dropping off packages. You can even go that extra mile and provide them with online or physical instructions with the parcel on how to handle online deliveries, including tips on removing outer packaging outside of the home, disinfecting items before handling and of course, washing their hands thoroughly after collection.
Ensuring the safe handling of goods within your business operations has never been more important than in the current climate, and we hope the above offers you plenty of insight into how you can uphold good hygiene standards to protect your workers and customers during this challenging time.
