BCI is here to help your business mitigate these effects, reopen safely, and get your people back to work while fully adhering to regulations and best practices.
For small business owners, COVID-19 has often been an existential struggle – determining whether your business will survive or potentially shut down permanently if you can’t find a way to deliver your products and services safely and in compliance with the many new regulations and protocols.
For contractors and industry, the challenges are different but no less significant – there have been incredible challenges in terms of managing worker’s compensation and keeping your workforce safe, and your projects on budget and on schedule.
BCI provides a comprehensive, effective and reliable solution to help your business reopen responsibly, remain compliant with regulations, and deliver a safe environment for your employees and customers.
There are new guidelines that apply across every type of business – from construction to barbershops, hair salons, wine tasting facilities and restaurants – regardless of your business model, there are some basic rules for business recovery that apply in every case.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have specified three key requirements for all businesses:
The Risk Assessment, which is step one, requires you to identify all the COVID-19 risks for your business. For example, common touchpoints, lunch areas, any areas that would have cross-contamination potential. Of course this assessment is very unique to each business; however every business has its own risk areas. This is a key area where having BCI as a partner can help greatly – because we’ve assessed numerous businesses already, we have the ability to quickly determine your greatest areas of risk.
Once the risk assessment is complete, the next step is to write the protocols for business recovery to open up safely and responsibly. This will address points like:
This plan basically needs to cover everything you need to do to put precautions in place for your business, so that you won’t have cross contamination – specifically, imagine for a moment that a person who is infected with COVID were to visit your business. How would you ensure that this person did not infect any of your other patrons or your staff? That’s what this plan would protect against. Given the huge and rapidly growing number of people who have been infected, it’s not a matter of if someone who is COVID positive will visit your business – it’s only a matter of when it will happen, and how you will make sure your business doesn’t enable further spread.
BCI specializes in delivering thorough, carefully researched Site-Specific Safety Plans that are tailored to the needs of your business, and our expertise helps ensure that not only will your plan be safe and effective, it will also pass muster with regulatory authorities in the event your business is inspected for compliance – further protecting you and your business.
Step three is that your business must designate someone at all times who will serve as a “COVID-19 Supervisor” who will manage implementation of safety procedures throughout the course of the day. This person must be trained in detail on the Site-Specific Safety plan. In addition, it’s vital to train and educate the whole staff so they can work effectively with the COVID-19 Supervisor to create a safe environment for your staff and guests.
The most important goal of this training is to give people confidence in coming back to work – to ease their anxiety so they can work with confidence. Your employees need to know exactly what they need to do throughout the course of their work day, to do whatever they need to in order to deliver your products and services, but do it safely and responsibly.
Your COVID-19 response is now part of your IIPP (Injury/Illness Prevention Plan) which is part of your regulatory compliance requirements. Your Risk Assessment and your Site-Specific Safety Plan are an addendum to the “infection control plan” in your IIPP, which is a requirement for both CDC and OSHA.
As we’ve transitioned from the “lockdown phase” to a “gradual reopening phase”, and as these phases have continued to fluctuate almost daily as new medical data comes out, this has produced chaos, uncertainty and anxiety for business owners. Most people want to go back to work, but they just don’t know what exactly they need to do.
Based on the protocols and processes that were dictated from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), BCI’s goal is to give those business owners and their employees safety and confidence to come back to work. The reality is that it’s inevitable that someone will come through your doors who is positive for the virus. However, if you have a well-developed Site-Specific Safety Plan that is being followed, your team and customers will remain safe. So the most fundamental thing we provide for your business is to ease the anxiety of coming back to work.
BCI can complete the entire COVID-19 process in just 2-3 days.
BCI stands alone in the crowd. As a team of military veterans, our lives revolve around mitigating risks. We have a proven track record of keeping people safe in the world’s most dangerous environments, and we’ve brought this discipline and experience to the challenge of COVID-19.
The guidelines are out there and available in plain English. It’s feasible for a business to do its own Risk Assessment and develop its own Site-Specific Safety Plan. But these are not typically core competencies for most business owners. If you’re a barbershop, your core competency is to cut hair. If you own a restaurant, your core competency is to provide a meal for your customers. Our core competency is occupational safety and health. This is what we do, and our team of professionals have been doing this every single day for over 12 years.
In talking with business owners who’ve attempted to “go it alone”, we’ve found that when they read the new regulations, most business owners skip right to the precautionary measures – having the right PPE or the signage, or the right stickers on the ground. But often they don’t do the first two steps: You can’t mitigate risk until you identify risk; you identify risk with a Risk Assessment. Then you need a plan to mitigate that risk, which is your Site-Specific Safety Plan. Then you can actually train your team and put precautionary measures in place. But when business owners try to start at the third step, it doesn’t meet the criteria and you set yourself up for failure.
In reality, the likelihood is that as a novice if you develop your own plan, you’re more likely to have a cross contamination incident, and less likely to pass an inspection by a licensing authority or governing body. This risks fines from the state as well as revenues, reputation, and ultimately your ability to stay in business. Working with the expert team at BCI avoids these risks at a very reasonable cost – far less than the cost of having a COVID incident in your business.
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