As employees and customers return to your business site, you’re likely introducing new safety requirements and guidelines in response to COVID-19. These new guidelines are in place for employee and customer safety. However, some people may not want to follow the guidelines. Here are ways to enforce new safety guidelines:

Explain Reasoning

Nobody wants to follow arbitrary rules, especially if they disrupt the norm. However, when people understand the reasoning behind the rules, they are more likely to follow them. When you release new safety policies and guidelines, make sure you explain how they promote health and safety. Also, giving your guidelines scientific base will help more people want to follow them. The CDC has some helpful resources for businesses. Making it obvious that safety is your main concern will help your employees and customers get onboard with new guidelines.

Give Instructions

Frequently, rules are broken because of lack of understanding, not intentionally. Before implementing new rules, give explicit instructions about your expectations. For example, let’s say you’re planning to require masks. To make this easier, you should provide masks of your own on-site, and check with each individual employee to make sure they received and understood instructions. The more your employees understand about the guidelines, the easier it will be for them to follow the rules.

Think Through Difficult Scenarios

With some of the new policies, there may be difficult, grey-area situations. Take time to think through potential difficulties and come up with procedures to deal with them. Going with our earlier example of masks, one problem could be an employee or customer has a health condition that prevents them from wearing a mask. Coming up with alternatives and solutions for this situation and all others will take time. Feel free to involve employees in brainstorming to get their perspective. You won’t be able to cover every possible scenario, but it will help to have solutions in place to some of the possible difficulties.

Use this advice to keep your employees and customers safe from the coronavirus.