How we are responding to the Coronavirus at Gaia Resources

Gaia Resources is a national company, with three offices in three states of Australia.  Over the last few days, we’ve been working out how we should respond to the threat that coronavirus presents in such a way that minimises risk to our business and ensures the health and safety of our team.

The facts around coronavirus are documented well on the various Health Department web sites around Australia; such as those in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and Queensland.

We are preparing for the impact that it could have on our places of business and workforce in a few different ways that we thought it important to put “on the record” for our clients and other interested parties.

Prevention

We have instigated a few relatively simple but sensible precautions to help prevent the spread of the virus; including encouraging staff to:

• Follow basic hygiene precautions – wash your hands, cough into your elbow, try to avoid touching your face, and use hand sanitiser,
• Do not come to work if you are sick or showing any symptoms of being sick, no matter how minor they are, and
• Stopping any unnecessary work-related travel interstate or overseas (which is something we try to do anyway, in order to minimise our environmental impact).

For any of our staff that have any health issues that mean that they are more susceptible to viruses (or have family members with relevant health issues), then we are supporting them working from home as they see fit, starting immediately.

If any of our team are sick and test positively to the virus, they will be quarantined at home as per the guidelines from the Health departments, and will only return to the workplace when they no longer show signs of illness and have seen out the entire recommended quarantine period (currently 14 days).  We are fortunate that for our teams they can work from home, and will do so during this period as best they can.

These relatively simple actions will help reduce the spread of coronavirus, and will also mean that our teams remain safe and healthy in the long run as well.

Preparation

Should there be an outbreak of coronavirus we will be shutting down our relevant offices and sending all staff home to recover, or work from home.  For our teams, these situations will happen if:

• Our offices (which are all in co-working spaces) decide to close voluntarily,
• We make a decision that we no longer wish to accept the risk of travelling to the offices and working in shared offices, or
• Our State governments implement some form of lockdown in response to the virus.

To that end, we are trialling our Business Continuity Plan (which we developed under our recent ISO accreditation) on Tuesday, 17th March, 2020, by having all of our staff work from home.  We are preparing for this already by determining what sort of equipment, procedures and communications we will need around the day, and putting this in place – and we will learn from the trial and implement further initiatives as a result.

We hope that we won’t have to enact this “for real”.  At the moment, much of the advice is to be alert, but not alarmed, and we are preparing as best we can to support our people, our projects and our clients in this situation.  We believe that the approach we outline above does just that, and we will be monitoring the situation and adjusting our approach to suit.

If you have any queries about how this will impact on projects we are delivering for you, then please contact your project manager, or call either myself or Andrew directly in the Perth office on (08) 92277309.

Piers