Preparing commercial property for extreme weather
Planning and knowing what to do when the temperature drops is important; it helps keep your employees and your customers safe, as well as ensuring that your buildings are ready and prepared for weather extremes.
Here’s a quick checklist of things you might want to consider doing to prepare your business:
- Check insurance policies to make sure your business is fully covered
- Keep heating on low out of office hours and at weekends to prevent frozen pipes, so set the heating to switch on if the temperature drops significantly
- Insulate pipes for additional protection
- Ensure you have purchased salt and grit so that pathways can be made safe for access
- Ensure any pathways are effectively lit for safe access
- Clear out any gutters
- If you are in an area prone to flooding, make sure you sign up for flood warnings here.
- You can also subscribe to weather warnings from the MET Office here.
Snow days
Many people can work from home so if this is something facilitated by your organisation it can be useful to prepare remote working strategies and enable employees to work remotely using their own personal devices. You can read a great article from Personnel Today answering five common employer queries when it comes to winter weather and work. There is also a handy guide from Acas about travel disruption and bad weather, you can read it here.
Communications
If you do have to close the business, ensure you have a clear communications strategy to let everyone know; this includes employees and clients and customers.
This can be deployed on your website, on company phone messages and email out of office signatures. WhatsApp groups can be a good way to keep teams involved and ensure they are aware of what the latest news is.
