Belterra’s Response to COVID-19
Over the last couple of months, like so many businesses in Canada, we at Belterra have been adapting to a changing business environment.Since we’ve been deemed an essential business in each province, we understand the importance of our role to ensure the continuous and safe operations of our many essential customers.
We continue to closely monitor the COVID-19 situation and in an effort to maintain the health and wellbeing of our employees whilst ensuring the continuous operations of our service locations, we have taken the following measures:
1. Restricting all non-essential
travel.
2. Accommodating office and sales
staff that can work from home to do so.
3. Implementing increased
cleaning/sanitizing services at all our locations.
4. Ongoing communication with
staff to adhere to preventative safety guidelines as set by Heath Canada
related to social distancing, hand washing and face touching and supporting
communication with reference materials.
5. Restricting non-Belterra staff
from access to our facilities and implementing a self-declaration process for
anyone that absolutely has to visit us.
6. Implementing a virtual health
consultation service for our employees that need to seek medical attention.
7. Where practical trying to keep
our service teams working in smaller dedicated teams to ensure service
continuity should a team member contract COVID-19.
8. Implementing a COVID-19 team
made up of our executives, senior management, and internal subject experts that
monitors changes in federal/provincial guidelines and discusses actions we can
take to safeguard our people and the business.
9. Providing staff with the
appropriate PPE.
10. Investing in new computers to
accommodate staff working from home.
11. Investing in improved web
meeting/conferencing capabilities and associated training to ensure we can stay
connected with internal and external customers.
12. Requiring employees who have
come in close contact with confirmed or possible COVID-19 cases or showing
cold/flu-like symptoms to self-quarantine for 14 days.
13. Restricting sales visits to
customer sites and physical internal business meetings.
14. Updating our Field Level Hazard
Assessment (FLHA) to include assessment of COVID-19 exposure risks
15. Rotating administrative/inside
sales staff members to work from home in order to minimize the number of
workers in a workplace on any given day.
16. Limiting physical contact
between office workers and field service workers.
17. Allowing field service workers
to take two vehicles on jobs where feasible or limiting two people per service
truck.
18. Adjusting workers’ shift
schedules to allow them to avoid peak times in transit.
19. Accommodating workers who
cannot attend work due to childcare responsibilities and health concerns by
providing job-protected leaves of absence.
20. Informing employees of
Employment Insurance and other programs provided by the government for
financial relief and providing Records of Employment to employees who need to
apply for these programs.
21. Developing and implementing a
Pandemic Preparedness Planning Guide across the company.
22. Where reductions in workforce
cannot be avoided, we’re doing our best to ensure the layoff is temporary in
nature and providing 90 days of benefits coverage continuance (minus STD/LTD)
to employees on temporary layoff.
All of our locations remain open at this time and we continue to monitor impacts on the supply of products with our key manufacturing partners. At this time we see no significant impact on our ability to supply and serve our customers and respectfully ask that you please reach out to any of our locations should you have any questions.
In closing, we are committed to supporting your business and wish you and your families all the very best of health as we navigate through this challenging time.
Sincerely,
Janice Stasiuk
President & CEO, Belterra Corporation