Lessons for Resilience
Consider reinforcing COVID-19 safety standards in your organisation
Organisations must ensure they, their employees, and people who visit their workplace are complying with COVID-19 safety measures e.g. wear a mask, sanitize and maintain social distancing. As time goes on and people become fatigued with regulations, standards may slip. It is the organisation's responsibility to ensure due diligence in identifying risks and mitigating them. This may require increased surveillance of working practices and trained Compliance Officers who specialise in encouraging compliance. Consider that Compliance Officers can:
- Ensure that COVID-19 safe practices in the workplace are updated, communicated, trained, and monitored effectively
- Constantly seek good practices from elsewhere and systematise these to enhance protection of people at work
- Balance legal requirements with response actions to ensure safety comes first
- Be a single, expert point of contact to address issues related to COVID-19 in an organisation
- Constantly evaluate workplace compliance with the regulations and report on breaches
Consider increased collaboration with local business associations
In one city in Denmark, a number of meetings are being held with local businesses to support local business and economic regeneration. These include:
- Weekly meetings with the local business association and the Mayor to explain the citys economic situation, advise on help packages for businesses, and explain business regeneration schemes
- Additional meetings to ask local businesses what type of projects they need to have funded immediately to inform local government's funding agenda
- Meetings to allow local businesses to bid for local regeneration projects funded by local government. These have included retrofitting schools with solar panels, renovation of local high street shops and buildings, and road works
- Local government have committed to paying invoices to business at the beginning of projects rather than the end, to provide businesses with more liquidity
This lesson was contributed by a Chief Resilience Officer in Denmark during project data collection.