The urgent re-design of work and processes in light of the government’s COVID‐19 guidance has shown what’s achievable when health and safety-related issues are prioritised. Organisations have discovered that they can rapidly adapt, improve hygiene, re-design tasks and adopt new technology. This experience may well benefit the promotion of workplace safety in future.

With COVID‐19, employers have had to think hard about keeping workers distanced from activities that risk exposure to the virus. Physical distancing is a basic workplace safety strategy that states, “keep the hazard away from the people and the people away from the hazard”. COVID has brought this key safety practice very much into the limelight and it’s been very effective. Getting back to such workplace health and safety basics has been a real positive. There may also now be an opportunity for a more general work re‐design to improve safety, particularly in regard to the hierarchy of controls.

Another positive is the renewed focus on workplace health and hygiene, which often takes a back seat to accident reduction. COVID‐19 has emphasised the importance of more general hygiene practices; surfaces have had to be more frequently cleaned and disinfected and we’ve all become accustomed to washing our hands more frequently. These are good practices, especially in workplaces where many surfaces are shared by lots of people. If the rigorous cleaning and handwashing continues, then this should help to reduce the frequency of illnesses among workers.

In Asia, people have long worn masks when in public, and/or when they have a cold or other contagious symptoms, to help prevent others from getting sick. The recommendation to continue wearing face coverings in enclosed spaces may conceivably reduce worker sickness absence, particularly during the flu season. While long-term mask wearing may be a step too far for many, lots of workplaces have installed Perspex or other barriers to separate workers and block airborne pathogens and it’s likely that these protective barriers will continue to be used for some time, not least because of the cost involved in putting them up in the first place.

Perhaps the biggest lesson we’ve learned in respect to workplace health and safety is that people are capable and willing to follow control measures, if their importance is understood and their implementation is led from the top. Overnight, workers were forced to adopt prescribed ‘staying COVID-secure practices’, many of which have now become second nature. Behaviour changes and habits are directly linked to the length of exposure to new environments, and research shows it takes on average about 66 days to form a new habit. The pandemic’s multiple waves have seen workers being exposed to new patterns of behaviour for some considerable time. This is certainly fertile ground for cementing longer-term safety consciousness.