Getting Workers Safely Back to Work in the COVID Era Supporting workers from the start demonstrates your commitment to their success and makes good business sense. By Kevin SchmidtDec 09, 2020 COVID-19 has made the already difficult job of safety professionals even more difficult. To further complicate things, many organizations have scaled back hours or temporarily ceased production. Others in high-demand industries have had to hire and get people to the floor fast. These changes have created additional—but often overlooked—challenges for safety professionals in their fight against COVID-19. The financial impact of slowdowns on organizations resulting from the COVID-19 disruption may be significant. Adding a wave of workers’ compensation claims will only make an already difficult situation worse. Innovative organizations are using physical therapists to help integrate physical readiness steps into their COVID-19 response to reduce injury risk to furloughed, post-COVID and new employees. Furloughed Workers A furloughed worker may assume a relatively sedentary lifestyle and quickly become deconditioned, thus increasing their chances of injury when they do return to work. Offering furloughed workers suggestions for a basic fitness program can be a way to keep employees engaged as part of the company. Participation with this program may be hit or miss, but any involvement puts employers ahead of the game. The following guidelines are common among successful fitness programs: • Home-based, involving little to no equipment • Simple and easy to follow • Convenient and brief • Perceived as valuable to the employee Workers who are required to manually lift, carry, push and pull need the endurance to stand and walk for the duration of their work shift. Maintaining endurance is relatively simple. Workers who return to jobs where they will be on their feet all day should try to stand and walk for at least two hours per day to maintain tolerance. Muscular strength is a critical fitness category to address. Simply put, if you don’t use it, you lose it. That being said, very few employees are likely to spend hours in their homes doing exercises. Doing a few exercises three to five times a week to address core strength should help. Let's block ads! (Why?)