Staff Safety

• Offer a safe place for employees to change/store work clothes and boots at the shop.

• Make every effort to maintain supplies of hand sanitizer and disinfecting soap at every sink and wash station.

• Ensure that all your employees wash their hands on a regular basis, and that they do so in a manner that is in line with Center for Disease Control (CDC) recommendations. 

• Make sure that commonly-used surfaces in the shop are sanitized throughout each day – many say hourly. Phones, keyboards, water fountains, door handles, restrooms, handheld equipment, etc. – all need to be routinely disinfected. 

• All employees should wear gloves, which helps to discourage touching the face and transmitting the virus.

• Vendors and other non-employees should not be allowed in the shop to reduce contact and exposure

• All vehicles should be disinfected before any employee gets in. Key touch points to be wiped down include (but are not limited to): door handles (inside and outside); armrests; steering wheel; seat belts; any push-button areas on the dash and doors (radio, electric windows, thermostat, etc.); cruise control and windshield wiper controls; glove box and center console; shift levers and knobs; hazard light buttons.

• Stagger lunches and breaks to encourage social distancing.

• Schedule shifts so some employees start earlier and leave earlier to have fewer employees in the shop at any given time.

• Consider staying open on weekends to further spread out employees’ time in the shop and allow some people to work flexible hours to handle family needs.

• Limit the size of meetings and maintain social distancing.

Customer Safety

• Do not allow customers in the shop. Meet them outside and at a safe distance

• Keep a stash of pens and when a customer signs documentation, have them keep the pen.

• Contact customers and offer a concierge-type pick up/drop off service – this will help you schedule bay times and completely disinfect vehicles upon completed work.

• Some shops are requiring scheduled appointments to spread out the number of people coming in for repair work.

• Particularly in collision shops, photo estimating is being utilized as much as possible.

• When all work is complete, the vehicle should be thoroughly disinfected before delivering it back to the customer.

• Communicate the measures your shop is taking with customers so they know you’re open for business and will feel safe bringing their vehicles in for service.

• Offer payment by phone or using a person-to-person bank-transfer system like Zelle.

• Disinfect fobs or keys and provide to vehicles owners in a sealed plastic bag upon delivery.

• Encourage night or early-bird vehicle drop-off and the use of a lockbox to avoid person-to-person contact.