It’s more important than ever to maintain safety – whether it’s outdoors or indoors, such as in a restaurant. Your job is to protect not only yourself, but also your employees and customers during a coronavirus. Here’s what you can do right now to keep everyone safe:

• Conduct a risk assessment: a COVID-19 risk assessment can help you manage risk and protect people. Determine what could cause transmission, think about who might be at risk, determine how likely someone is to be exposed, and take steps to eliminate or control the risk.
• Clean more often: Increase the frequency of cleaning surfaces, especially those that are touched frequently. Add more hand sanitizer stations and ask both employees and customers to use them and wash their hands more often. This is especially important in a restaurant where chefs regularly handle food.
• Face masks: if required by law, ask your customers to wear face masks to ensure the safety of themselves and others, including your employees. This also applies to your employees; they need to wear masks or face shields to stop potential transmission.
• Forcing social distancing: as an employer, you may need to change the layout of your restaurant in both the kitchen and the main seating area. You can have fewer staff in the kitchen and even put up signs and one-way systems for everyone to follow so that everyone can stay a safe distance from each other.
• Increase ventilation: keep doors and windows open where possible, and have ventilation systems on at all times.
• Send employees home when they develop symptoms: even if you decide to reduce the number of employees during shifts, if someone shows any symptoms of coronavirus, send them home for self-isolation. Whether it’s a cough, high fever, or even loss of sense of taste or smell, they shouldn’t be working in a restaurant.

Take care of your employees, yourself and your loved ones!