On Monday, 18 May most of our team will begin a staggered return back to our offices in Hamilton and Tauranga after working from home for the past eight weeks.
To ensure everyone’s safety, we are rearranging our office layouts to ensure physical distancing between staff. We will not be use any of our small meetings rooms until further notice.
As our PM reiterated when she announced the move to Alert Level 2, we must continue to behave as if COVID-19 is still in our communities. While we are tracking well as a nation, we must continue to play it safe, be vigilant and be very careful.
With this in mind, Alert Level 2 is not a return to business as usual for The People’s Project.
Our service will continue to operate as we have throughout the response to COVID-19 – and we will continue to keep our office doors closed to general walk-ins. Being back in the office and with the freedom to move about the community once more, we are able to increase our outreach programme.
We will however prioritise providing support to people as much as possible by email, phone and text – which has been working well over the past eight weeks. The less people in our workplaces, the lower the risk, and we will only meet with people in the office if we absolutely have to and if we cannot help them in other ways – and this will be by appointment only.
In the office, people will be asked to observe strict hygiene protocols, combined with an induction to the office upon entry including recording people’s details for contact tracing if required.
We know constant change can be difficult, and we sincerely appreciate your support as we have responded and adapted to COVID-19, even when the path has not been totally clear. We remain grateful for your continued support as we navigate our way through the many considerations, decisions and actions we need to make and take to ensure our frontline essential workers, the people we are here to serve and our valued partners, are kept safe. This remains our priority.