A 3 step guide to getting your workplace, COVID-19 ready.

A recent review of the survival of human coronaviruses on surfaces by the WHO found that this virus can stay infected on surfaces, ranging from 2 hours up to 9 days.

An average employee touches 40 surfaces over a typical 8-hour workday, punching in her attendance, pouring her regular latte, booking a room on the meeting displays placed conveniently across the floor, and the list goes on.

Picture this.

9 am on Monday.

300 employees at work at your office.

Three hundred employees, each touching 40 surfaces, with each surface carrying a possible infection active up to 5 days. And here we haven’t even included visitors and third-party service providers entering your premises.

Sounds terrifying, right?

This is why WHO and other global authorities released workplace guidelines that enable you to pandemic-proof your workplace. These guidelines include regular handwashing, surface sanitization, respiratory hygiene, social distancing, reduction in touchpoints, thermal scanning, facial mask adherence, and contact authentication and tracing.

So, how should you go about the mammoth and intimidating task of getting your workforce back to work?

We have identified the three concrete steps you can follow to get your workplace pandemic-ready and safe for employees and visitors, starting today.

Step 1 – Run a thorough pandemic-proofing audit

Have you ever heard of the term baby proofing? The process of proofing your apartment or home to ensure nothing harms or endangers your new-born? What’s the first step in this process? Running a comprehensive check of every nook and corner. Well, pandemic-proofing is not very different.

First things first, take a pen, paper, or google sheet and get right to it. Categorize your workspace by area or function and start dissecting all processes that need pandemic proofing. Then start rating each category on pandemic-readiness and follow this up with the next actionable steps towards proofing those areas. For example – all hand-based doors converted to foot-operated or automatic sensor-operated doors; sanitizer bottles transitioned to sensor-based sanitizers.

So, the first step – become your very own office pandemic detective.

Step 2 – Upgrade workplace services sans contact

Attendance

Touchless staff attendance solutions are a relatively new offering and available in the market in all shapes and sizes to fit your specific needs. At Veris, we have developed configurable contactless attendance solutions to meet the varied needs of an organization in the times of COVID-19.

Veris solutions harness the power of facial recognition, location-aware, and beacon-based check-ins, to replace infection-prone biometric attendance systems.

An add-on thermal infrared camera running AI and sensor fusion verify the facial biometrics of the employee, records body temperature, face mask adherence, and instantly signals to the access control system if all conditions are successful.

Visitor management

Apart from employees, visitors are a large part of workplace occupants. These visitors could take the form of guests, vendors, contractors, and customers. Our touchless visitor check-in solution enables your guest to check-in via their handhelds, scan a QR-code, enter a virtual visitor lobby, and confirm registration. It empowers your teams to create a touchless, safe, and secure visitor experience.

There is also an option to enable our advanced COVID-19 visitor screening module. Our visitor screening solution aligns with WHO-recommended contact tracing and screening of asymptomatic, but high-risk visitors. It sensitizes your visitor, screens for possible symptoms, alert teams, and highlights their exposure to illness.

Employee Scheduling

Managing staggered entry, booking work desks, car parking, lunch meals, meeting rooms is essential for active distancing, safety, and compliance. To ensure employee safety and security, you can schedule employee access and all the services mentioned above using the upcoming Veris Scheduler. Regular and recurring Invites will be created by Veris automatically without any hassle for employees.

The Veris Scheduler will ensure that employees arrive as per their assigned shifts, and prevents crowding at the entrances and choke points. To curb the flow of non-essential visitors,  employees would be able to seek approvals from their respective supervisors before sending out invites using Veris.

All of these tools together can make the lives of both administrators and employees much more comfortable, focusing only on the essentials.

Step 3 – Continuously optimize processes to become a safer workplace

There is nothing like 100% safe, it needs continuous strife to attain even higher levels of safety. These measures should be an enabler in times of COVID-19, not a burden. With detailed usage logs, audit trails, and user interaction insights, Veris gears workplace administrators to optimize all the relevant processes in real-time.

From check-in workflows to alerts and notifications, space and time utilization, safety measurement, office permissible occupancy levels, and fine-tuning other critical aspects and KPIs, Veris lets you do it all, without sacrificing the performance and productivity of the organization.

How does Veris ensure your safety?

1. Making workplaces COVID-ready –  Unlike biometric-based attendance systems that work via touch on shared devices, our solution offers 100% touchless clock-ins. It aligns with the WHO-workplace guidelines centered around reducing touchpoints and protecting staff from touching infected surfaces. With the new norm of rotational workplaces to follow social distancing norms, it becomes imperative to keep a strict and accurate record of premise occupancy. It is highly useful for contact tracing needs with COVID-19 declarations and automated visitor screening.
2. Seamless integration with existing processes – A truly effective solution must extend beyond just the technology, preferably ensure that employees and visitors seamlessly move in and out of your premises without hassle. Our touchless solution easily integrates with QR code-based access control and runs with your existing RFID readers and supports BLE and NFC modes. Similarly, it can link with your Active Directory, HRMS, or any other ERP systems, pushing relevant records for compliance, reporting, payroll, and analysis purposes.

So, what are you waiting for? Grab that smartphone lying at your desk, talk to our workplace specialists today, and let us take it from there.

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