What action is the Minister taking to support businesses that rely on staff to work from offices that are located in towns and cities across Wales?
Through continued engagement with our social partners we have developed guidance that aims to help businesses and employers and provided practical considerations on how they could operate.
The guidance is based on five principles for workplace safety:
- Care: Our health and well-being comes first
- Comply: The laws that keep us safe must be obeyed
- Involve: We all share the responsibility for safe work
- Adapt: We will all need to change how we work
- Communicate: We must all understand what to do
In terms of workforce: workers are only allowed to return to the workplace if it is not reasonably practicable for them to work from home. A link to the workplace guidance can be found via: https://gov.wales/workplace-guidance-employers-and-employees-covid-19
Through necessity, the pandemic accelerated the trend of working from home, making businesses and organisations pivot operations quickly to continue to deliver during lockdown. These actions have proven just how effective and productive teams can be working from home whilst eliminating the daily commute.
As the First Minister has noted in his response to WQ81024, we will be making an announcement about our proposals to embed a workplace culture across Wales that values and supports remote working – either at or near to home.