In this article I will go through some of the technology you can use in Ireland to help you implement the government’s Return to Work Protocols using PivotCentral.
Pre-Return to Work Checklist With PivotCentral
The first thing the Irish government is asking us to do is to get all staff members and visitors to the workplace to fill out a Return to Work Checklist. Questions like “Do you have symptoms of cough, fever, high temperature in the past 14 days?” need to feature on the checklist. Whether it is government mandate or just common practice, you will need a pre-return checklist filled out by every employee. I would go even further and use this checklist to check in with the employee on a regular basis even if they work from home.
To avoid flooding HR with a mountain of paper documents and avoid a nightmare of tracing who has and has not returned the form, I would recommend moving to a PivotCentral Smart Checklist Software.
Create an online form you can distribute to all the staff to be filled out before coming back to work. Security can then check at the door if the Pre-Return form has been completed to allow access to the building.
Team Contact Tracing Using Smart Tags
Another recommendation is that workers must be organised into teams. Which sounds obvious to do as we all work in some type of team structure. The problem is that the Irish government does not refer to a team in the company organisational sense but refers to a team in the physical sense. This means an employer needs to setup physical groups of people that will work together no matter their organisational structure. Managers will also have to record if they have been working with other team members in the office.
You can use PivotCentral Smart Tags or Armbands to track who has been in contact with anyone beyond the team . This can be done by using NFC technology and any modern smart phone with an NFC chip. For this to work all staff must have an NFC enabled smart badge. If this is not the case in your company then there are NFC armbands and stickers you can use. The manager can simply scan the staff members smart tag and with a smart NFC checklist software record who they have been working with. It is cheap, easy to implement and workable in real life.
Crowd Control in Your Facility
An obvious recommendation by the government is that you need to avoid crowds throughout your facility. Traffic in canteens, entrance halls and meeting rooms should be kept to a minimum to ensure physical distancing and contain the spread of the virus.
A solution is to use WIFI enabled Infrared proximity sensors. They do not invade anyone’s privacy and are cheap to implement. Using smart sensor tracking software you can alert appropriate staff when and where crowds are forming. Keeping everyone away from the coffee dock will be important in the future.
Clean, Clean, Clean
The government protocol dictates that cleaning must take place at least twice daily in all parts of the facility and after every use of critical rooms like bathrooms and meeting rooms. Not only is this wise, it is critical to get staff comfortable to go back to work. As an employer you will have to show that desks, meeting rooms and communal areas have been decontaminated. Most companies already have cleaning crews in place so implementing this protocol will be a matter of tracking and tracing.
Still, we have all seen the paper cleaning lists on the back of doors with miraculous future cleaning. Yes, some cleaners can clean in the future. The next time you are in a bathroom with a cleaning list, check it out. Paper based checklists are not enough to give your staff the confidence that the facilities are clean. Digital solutions that cannot be tampered with are the way to go. Smart checklists can be used by the cleaning crew to indicate when an area has been decontaminated.
Using the same PivotCentral Smart Tag Checklists, the staff can scan these tags and see when either a meeting room or facility was last cleaned. At the same time, they can request a refresh. This same technology can even be used on people’s desks. Simply hang a PivotCentral smart tag on every desk which the staff member can scan and request it to be cleaned. It’s like hanging the ‘clean my room’ tag on a door handle.
These are some of the PivotCentral solutions regarding the Return to Work Safely Protocol. With the right implementation this should not have to impact people too much. Anything we can do to stop the spread of this virus makes it worth it.