The winter season is fast approaching and your office needs to be ready to face the seasonal changes. From a business perspective, it is essential that your office is sufficient and capable to face the harsh weather challenges thrown by winter.
While facility managers and office admins are supposed to pay close attention to this, business owners should also pay attention to the requirements. Improper winter readiness can result in safety issues and lead to a dip in productivity among the employees.
In this article, we are going to speak to expert facility managers and ask them about some areas, which businesses should concentrate on to make their office winter-ready.
List of Areas to Concentrate on to make the Office Winter Ready
1. Heating Infrastructure for the Office-
If you are in a big office, you would be using centralized heating or cooling facilities. However, newer offices leave the management of heat to individual office owners to set up their own infrastructure regarding the same.
To ensure that your employees do not feel discomfort from the harshness, offices can go for infrared space heaters. These come in various sizes and shapes, use electricity, and can be operated through a smartphone.
2. Office Pathways and Sidewalks-
Snowfall has the potential to convert the humble pathway or sidewalk into a dangerous health and safety hazard. These areas can become dangerously slippery and result in slip and fall injuries for everyone who is walking to the office.
If you do not want to face a slip and fall lawsuit, you should ensure that these areas are properly maintained by the relevant authorities. You can also put up warning signs at multiple locations to inform people about the nature of the pathway.
Office managers can consult a work safety specialist to help implement safety measures in the office. The safety officer can help plan the best alternative routes and solutions for highly slippery pathways and sidewalks to promote the safety of employees, customers, and visitors.
3. Illnesses, Diseases, and Infections-
We are still grappling with the disastrous COVID-19 all over the world. As offices are limping back to normal you should ensure that the cold flu and infection season is taken care of. Having medicines, temperature checks, sanitizers, and tissues is a must for the employees.
Offices should also go for temperature checks and time to time disinfection and sanitization to ensure that the premises are clean from germs and viruses. You can also go a step further and renovate your restrooms so that there’s minimum contact and maximum germ containment. This can be done by swapping the traditional taps with sensor ones and installing floor-to-ceiling partitions. This type of partition allows for full privacy, and germ containment while adding a fresh look to the restroom interior, you can check out some examples at onepointpartitions.com. All this can go a long way to ensuring that your employees do not fall sick and work continues without any issues.
4. Energy Issues and Backups-
Energy is a critical business aspect. The preventive step in energy and backup issues is choosing a reliable energy provider. In that way, businesses can get prompt technical and customer support when energy issues arise.
In markets where electricity is deregulated, like Texas, business owners can cut their electricity bills by shopping for their electricity supplier. Business electricity rates are very competitive, and you should always compare prices before renewing with your current supplier.
Aside from choosing a trusted energy provider, offices must consider environmental factors when managing energy issues and backups. Season and climate changes may cause a significant increase in energy demands, affecting distribution and electricity rates.
The winter season can be accompanied by storms of all kinds. If your electricity is down, it might affect work. To ensure that this does not blow a deal to your daily operations, it is necessary that offices have made arrangements for alternative sources of power.
Having investors, checking the UPS systems, and ensuring that a full-proof back-up plan is available can help in keeping all the computer screens on even during the worst snowstorms. Businesses, which ignore their power needs suffer from an outage for a very long time.
Sometimes, even if you have a good backup plan, problems still arise. One possible reason is improper installation, assessment, and repair. When power issues occur, it causes a tremendous impact on your customers and your overall business. Your reputation might also decline because of the impact of energy issues on client experience. Energy problems also affect the productivity levels in the office, such as unsaved files or projects on the computer due to power issues.
Moreover, it’s crucial to choose the right people to do the job. Commercial electricians are available to help business and property owners check their electrical systems before the winter season. They are licensed and experienced in testing electrical distribution to avoid power outages due to short circuits and other types of electrical failure.
Office managers and business owners also need to make sure that all electrical fixtures are high in quality. Even if you have an expert electrician but have poor quality electrical fixtures, energy problems are likely to occur during the winter season. Hence, you need to invest in durable electrical supplies.
You can source electrical fixtures, such as Bay Power circuit breakers and other electrical supplies online or from physical, electrical supply stores. Just make sure that you’re dealing with a legitimate company that sells electrical supplies and fixtures. In this way, you won’t run into problems in the long run, especially during very cold months.
5. Maintenance of Water Lines, and other Infrastructure-
Winters are particularly harsh on pipelines, connections, and other outdoor infrastructures like doors and windows. You need to ensure that a thorough maintenance check has been done in all these areas. This should ideally be done well in advance to address issues if they arise.
Most of the contractors would refuse to work during the winter and you stand the risk of staying without water and other essentials. Having a well-formulated maintenance plan and creating a checklist can go a long way to avoid these issues in the office.
Office managers and business owners can hire a licensed plumber to check water and sewer lines. Hiring a facility manager to inspect and supervise office plumbing, electrical, and HVAC systems is also advisable to reduce the workload of office managers. By doing so, office managers can focus on supervising business operations than addressing facility and other infrastructure problems.
In addition to the above points, offices should also ensure that warm liquids, good food, hats, umbrellas, and other important utilities are available during the winter season.
Why Businesses should Focus a great deal on making their Offices Ready for Winter?
As we have already pointed out, one of the primary reasons for businesses to do the same is to ensure that work does not suffer. If employees slip on the pathway or get the flu during the season, then work suffers. If work suffers, then deadlines start getting missed. The same results in lower revenue achievements.
Caring for the employees and creating a positive working environment can go a long way to boosting productivity. They might speak to their friends in other companies and say how their office is taking care of them and to what extent. All these small issues can go a long way in pitching forth a really positive image of the company.
If you are working with other vendors, they will also get impressed by the fact that your organization did not let the harsh climate affect deliverables. It is the responsibility of business owners and the higher management to use the season to achieve multiple things.
If you are a business, who thinks that getting your office ready for the winter is an unnecessary thing, then you would not be prepared to face unfortunate eventualities. If you do not want to invest the bare minimum, it is better that you ask your employees to work at home.
The Final Word
The harsh winters can throw multiple challenges to work. While you may be prepared to face some of them, there might be more, which you would have to deal with as and when you experience the same. In this article, we have tried to list down five of the most important areas, offices should pay attention to when it comes to the winters.
Ensuring that your heating works well, getting infrared space heaters, cleaning, and warning about slippery pathways, etc. can go a long way in ensuring that your work improves in productivity, employee satisfaction, and increased revenue figures.
Can you list some more areas where businesses should concentrate on during the winter season? Let us know in the comments section below.
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