The information you need to provide to staff about COVID-19 can change in the blink of an eye, but there’s a very simple way to get your message across.
When it comes to rules and regulations around COVID-19 in Australia, things change at a rapid pace and the requirements aren’t always clear. Some beaches are open, some are closed. You can go for a walk in a park, but sit down in that same park and you could be in trouble.
Unfortunately, the workplace isn’t immune to these changes and the consequences of breaking the rules are severe.
One new requirement recently set out by SafeWork Australia is that all businesses must now have COVID-19 related signage in their workplace. In this article, we’ll walk you through the details of this new requirement and outline what you need to do to comply.
The new guidelines
Safework Australia’s new guidelines outline six things employers need to be doing, including:
- Having signs and posters around the workplace to remind workers and others of the risks of COVID-19 and the measures necessary to stop its spread.
A lack of compliance with these new guidelines could have severe consequences for our organisation.
Complying with the guidelines
While a number of organisations have created poster templates that others can download and use, one of the best ways to comply with the guidelines is to use digital signage.
Digital signage is a better option for a number of reasons, such as:
- It gets the message across better. There’s a reason millions of retail and hospitality businesses are leveraging digital signage. It captures attention and gets the message across better than static posters hung in a corner.
- Easier to update as rules and regulations change. Digital signage can be easily updated to communicate new information as it comes to light. These days, that’s happening quite often.
- Can be managed centrally to ensure compliance across all locations. If your organisation operates from multiple locations, printing posters, shipping them to each location and hoping the manager puts them up in the right spot is risky, and could result in non-compliance. With digital signage, you can ensure compliance by creating signs on a single computer and setting them to display the same message across various locations.
- Full audit trail of what showed at what time in what locations. If something does go wrong, digital signage provides a full, auditable history of which messages displayed in which locations at what time. It means you’ve got records to prove you met your compliance obligations.
- It can be used to show other messages too. As well as helping you meet your SafeWork Australia signage requirements, digital signage can show other messages too. Many organisations are already using digital signage in the workplace to communicate company updates, promote company goals and values, let people know about upcoming events, inform people of job vacancies to increase referrals, and much more.
Figure: Mandoe Media’s digital signage used to communicate important information within the workplace.
Getting digital signage in your workplace
Contrary to popular belief, digital signage isn’t expensive, nor is it difficult to source.
Mandoe Media is a leading provider of digital signage solutions in Australia. Our cloud-based software makes it easy to design beautiful signage, deploy it on your screens and manage what’s displayed on them at any given time.
It’s relatively inexpensive to get started with digital signage in the workplace, says Steve Baxter, founder of Mandoe Media.
“We can provide the screen and software to create and manage your signage, plus install it all and train you on how to use it, for as little as $70 per month,” says Baxter.
The training is simple, he adds: “Although we have larger customers like McDonalds and David Jones using the software, most of our customers are small ‘mum and pop’ businesses that are creating and managing the signage themselves. It’s that easy to use.”
Mandoe have even created a series of professionally-designed, compliant templates that users of their digital signage software can deploy to their screens in just one click.
Source; HRM The News Site for Australian HR Institute, 28 April 2020, “How to comply with SafeWork Australia’s new COVID-19 signage requirements”, Aaron Beashel, (https://www.hrmonline.com.au/sponsored-content/how-to-comply-with-safework-australias-new-covid-19-signage-requirements/)
