Supporting our clients on COVID-19

At the time of this report, the novel coronavirus is affecting communities and businesses on multiple continents, having a profound impact on people, markets and the global economy. Companies are deploying multi-faceted responses to the pandemic as it affects both human lives and business continuity.

Along with taking measures within our own company, ERM’s safety, occupational health and hygiene professionals have been working since mid-January with our clients’ COVID-19 response teams to protect front-line employees working through the pandemic and those returning to work now. Our industry-leading experts have been supporting business continuity aspects of the pandemic and sharing best practice across sectors and geographies.

As the epidemic turned into a pandemic, the nature of our services developed rapidly. Initially we helped clients to develop digital tools to track the spread of the virus, gather data on employee health and exposure, and develop pandemic and business continuity plans. Throughout the early stages of the pandemic as essential operations continued to run, we developed playbooks, new work processes and supporting training videos for front-line workers to work safely in a COVID-19 constrained working environment. As the number of new cases and deaths have started to decline in some regions, we are now fully engaged in supporting the safe return to workplaces.

Whether returning to offices, retail outlets, manufacturing facilities, mines or oil refineries, we are helping clients with the disciplined adherence to process and procedure, which is what is required to keep employees safe in this new operating environment.

Many of our clients are global leaders in safety and fully understand their duties in terms of a) providing a safe place of work; b) providing employees with the procedures, tools and guidance to work safely; and c) verifying that they are working safely. While we have been busy since January helping with the first two of these, we are now developing protocols and tools to self-assess and remotely audit the provisions that have been put in place to protect front-line workers across the world.

We are very proud of our integrated teams of specialists in the way that they have responded to this crisis. The rapid development of innovative approaches to address the practical challenges faced by our clients and the incredible speed with which teams and networks have formed and shared expertise, have provided us with new ways of working that will be of great benefit to our clients and our own operations going forward.