5 Guidelines for Protecting Our Residential Building Maintenance Staff

Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

Share on

LinkedIn

Many, many of us in Boston and its surrounding communities and indeed across the state live in apartment or condominium buildings. In our cities, we urban cliff dwellers live cheek by jowl with little thought until now that we should be practicing physical distancing. We are also very used to the convenience of building managers or superintendents, accepting or delivering our packages, letting repair people into our units, in some cases greeting our visitors, or coming to assist us in our units if a problem develops with our appliances or any household apparatus.

While we are now practicing physical distancing, we may not be giving a lot of thought to our supers or building managers and what we as residents should do to help keep them safe. These employees who make our lives comfortable and convenient and perform all kinds favors and kindnesses for residents face the same dangers that we face, only they are supposed to continue performing their jobs. In my condo building in Cambridge, our management company, First Residential, a very large national firm, has issued guidelines to our residents to help keep residents and our building super and maintenance people safe. Here they are below and I hope you find them helpful.

Maintenance and the superintendent should not be asked to enter a unit unless there is a true emergency.
Residents should postpone scheduling any non-essential trades people to be in the building.
All requests of the building super should be done by phone.
Do not go to the building maintenance office or the superintendent’s unit.
Do not make requests for utility shut offs, or access to common areas unless there is a real emergency.

In addition to the above, those of us in apartment or condo buildings usually take elevators on a daily basis. As a courtesy to one another, it is probably wise not to share elevators with residents from other units and it would be good idea also to wear gloves or place something between your finger and the elevator floor buttons. This same wisdom should be applied in all common areas and all commonly used entrances and exits. While our employees are most likely wiping down buttons and doorknobs, they can’t do it every time someone enters or leaves the building, so a little help from all of us makes our buildings safer.

Do YOU have tips to share? Add them as comments below!

Get Our COVID-19 News, Tips & Resources!

Name
First Last
Email
Name
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Read Our COVID-19 Roundups:

Hubwonk Ep. 8: Who is WHO? COVID-19, Massachusetts, and the unhealthy World Health Organization

0 Comments

June 2, 2020

Hubwonk host Joe Selvaggi and Pioneer Healthcare Senior Fellow Josh Archambault are joined by Hoover Institution’s Dr. Lanhee Chen to discuss the role that the World Health Organization (WHO) plays, what dysfunction may have contributed to the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what steps can be taken to bring back transparency and trust.

Study: Safely Reopening Office Buildings Will Require Planning, Innovation

0 Comments

June 1, 2020

Safely bringing employees back into workplaces presents a significant challenge for employers located in office buildings, particularly when it comes to elevator operations and building entry and exit. To address the challenge, managers must develop plans to control the flow of workers, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

Acclaimed Poet & Former NEA Chairman Dana Gioia on Poetry & Arts Education

0 Comments

May 29, 2020

This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Dana Gioia, a poet, writer, and the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, to talk about why the arts are so pivotal to the intellectual and civic development of America’s K-12 schoolchildren.

38.8 percent of the Massachusetts workforce and 28.3 percent of the U.S. workforce have filed unemployment claims over the past ten weeks.

0 Comments

May 28, 2020

Data released today by the U.S. Department of Labor shows that 38.8 percent of the Massachusetts workforce and 28.3 percent of the U.S. workforce have filed unemployment claims since the COVID-19 unemployment surge began ten weeks ago.