Covid 19 has drastically shaken up how businesses operate. Over the last two years we've had lockdowns, working from home, parents needing more flexibility in their work to deal with homeschooling, masks, distancing, santising, delivering more services remotely, increasing online purchasing, serving customers at the door...
It's been an impressive display of adaptibility and good old Kiwi ingenuity by NZ businesses, and now we have to deal with the next stage - Omicron.
Based on overseas experiences, most businesses are probably resigned to the fact that many or even all of their staff are likely to contract Omicron at some point, probably this year. Certainly staff are likely to come into contact with someone who has it. So the question they'll be grappling with is how to manage the inevitable isolation periods in order that the business can continue to operate. If you are identified as a close contact of a case then you must isolate for 10 days and undergo 3 Covid tests before you're cleared to return to work and society. And that scenario doesn't even account for actually contracting the virus. It's easy to imagine a situation in which an entire staff is taken out of action all at once because one staff member gets Covid, and a chain of transmission could last for several weeks. Could your business continue to operate under these circumstances?
Some strategies to prevent this scenario include working from home for staff who can do so, splitting your staff into groups or implementing shifts and preventing mingling between the groups, or physically distancing different sectors of your workforce on the premises. Here at Green Mouse we've decided to split up both our administrative team and technical team and alternate who is at the office and who is working from home. That way our technicians won't be close contacts of each other and work will be able to continue.
Many of these strategies will involve some working from home or rearranging of office computer hardware, and we're happy to assist with this. We have laptops, monitors, webcams, powerline kits to extend wifi coverage etc. Please contact us if you'd like to discuss additions or changes to your computing set up.