COVID-19: On-Site Risk Assessment and Guidance

Here at PowerON, we have been working hard alongside our customers to ensure preparations to enable remote working are in place and your workforce are able to work as efficiently and effectively as they are in an office environment.

We appreciate that the government guidance on Covid-19 is changing on a weekly if not daily basis and that the changes to the rules of lockdown can be hard to keep on top of. In light of this we wanted to let you know what we are doing to support our customers and staff members as we slowly emerge into what is becoming known as the ‘new normal’  

During the past few months we have moved premises into a newly secured office space at Escrick Business Park on the outskirts of York, this new premises was on the road map for us since before Christmas and was temporarily put on hold due to lockdown coming into force, we have however in the past few weeks been able to transition from our previous office into this much larger and brighter space which has enabled us to provide space for a number of our office based staff to get out of the house and back into the office. In line with this we have put a lot of safety measures in place to ensure we are COVID-secure and a copy of out office risk assessment which includes visitors to our premises can be found here. We continue to work, through a phased approach to open up more space to our colleagues with the ultimate hope that we can all see each other again before too long.

The next stage of our plans is to see how we can safely meet the needs of our customers where onsite work is required to support you in your plans for the coming months. This as I am sure you will appreciate carries with it a number of considerations, which need to be assessed on an ongoing basis. We want to outline our current guidance which has been issued to PowerON colleagues on how we manage requests for visits to customer site. 

Where appropriate we will always strive to deliver our work remotely – we have seen great success in the remote working model over the past few months and will try to maintain this where possible going forward, however we also appreciate there are certain elements of our services where it just works better to be ‘socially-distanced’ face-to-face, so if you have a requirement that falls into this category we are doing the following:

• For each on-site request we will require a copy of your risk assessment for on-site visitors which covers the risks associated with COVID-19 

• We will review your risk assessment internally to ensure it meets with HSE/government guidelines 
• Unfortunately for now, due to the potential requirement for overnight stays and use of public transport, we will not be carrying out any on-site work in London for the next few weeks 
• We will be keeping an eye on areas which are subject to local lockdowns but will ask you to confirm that your office/site location is not subject to a lockdown at the time completing our PowerON on-site risk assessment 
• We will complete our risk assessment with you over the phone prior to the site visit/meeting being confirmed 
• We are sure you’re as conscious as we are about protecting your staff and our colleagues during on-site visits, so as part of our risk assessment we will ask you what provisions you have in place around hygiene and PPE, and confirm whether our colleague needs to bring anything (not provided) with them
  • unfortunately if provisions in place do not meet our guidelines we will have to decline to visit site and arrange for the work to take place remotely or at a later date 

• Please note that as a company we do not endorse the use of gloves for our employees, we instead advocate regular hand washing  
• Face masks are a matter which is being hotly debated at the moment and as we adhere to government guidelines these will be worn on public transport and in shops, however when we are on-site with you, we would prefer to stick with the two-metre social distancing rule so that face masks do not have to be worn as a mitigation if the distance was one metre or more
• Once we have completed our on-site risk assessment we will either confirm the site visit can go ahead or we will work with you to mutually agree an alternative plan, be that remote delivery or delivery at a later date 
• During completion of the risk assessment we will ask you to nominate an owner who will ensure all of the provisions to protect our colleagues against COVID-19 risk will be adhered to on-site and provide a summary of the agreed provisions – we must at this stage highlight that if we arrive onsite and provisions are not in place as agreed we will ask our colleague to leave, as we cannot put their health at risk, if this unfortunate situation occurs we will charge cancellation for that day and any subsequent days which are impacted by this situation that fall within our 10-day cancellation period. 
• We have processes in place internally to monitor the risk status of our colleagues and if anything changes in relation to staff wellness, we will inform you as soon as is practicably possible and work on an alternative delivery plan. We ask you to do the same to ensure we have as much notice as possible to re-arrange the work should one of your team fall ill with COVID-19 

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with your account manager and they’ll be happy to help.