How do you de-risk work environments?
Eight months ago, COVID-19 disrupted the way we work. Today, that disruption is still seen in various forms. From implementing physical measures like extensive sanitization of workspaces and equipment, reconfiguring work stations to maintain proper social distancing, pre-screening staff and visitors, stocking up on masks and personal protective equipment (PPE), to enabling remote work options, our focus has been how to keep the business running while still keeping everyone safe. The biggest question is to open or not open? and if it’s in everyone’s best interest to be back together again, do you open now or open later?
One of the key considerations needs to be how well positioned you are in creating a culture of safety. In one of my recent articles published in the Training magazine, I wrote about how communication, collaboration, trust, and responsiveness can help ensure the health of employees and the business alike.
- Because long-term exposure to any potential risk leads to complacency, organizations need to go beyond one-time training and instead communicate regularly with the latest updates and procedures.
- Collaboration is fundamental to ensure that prevention and mitigation policies and processes reflect workers’ needs and concerns across the business.
- Collaboration doesn’t work unless businesses establish a sense of safety and trust. Employees who fear lost wages may hesitate to report symptoms or potential contact in their self-assessments. Worse, they may decide to “tough it out” and come to work because their symptoms are relatively mild — setting the stage for an outbreak.
- How quickly a company responds to COVID-19 exposure can impact not only workers’ health but also the risk of liability and the ability to continue operating.
All these measures are of course nearly impossible if you rely on manual processes to implement them.
With an automation system like SafetyTek, you can quickly put in place a solid strategy that can help with COVID-19 prevention and mitigation.
We cover everything from communicating effectively, where our content delivery system helps send out COVID-19 safety training and confirms that they have been received and read through, to a free and easy-to-use self-assessment tool. Before coming to work each day, workers can answer a few questions, based on the guidelines you follow, right from their mobile phones. The information from the self-assessments feed into a dashboard that Safety or HR managers can see in real-time which employees are reporting in, how many have symptoms or are at risk for exposure, and other related metrics. This all helps with better decision making.
This week we also announced a new Instant Results feature. Companies can now get the immediate updates needed to prevent potentially infected employees from coming into contact with other workers:
- Employees use their mobile phones to fill out the COVID-19 Self-Assessment form, and if everything checks out, they instantly get a green light to show they can come to work or a red light, indicating that they need to wait for directions from their supervisor.
- Managers and supervisors automatically receive an alert email or text for any worker with a red light warning. They can then contact the employee to determine whether it is safe to come to work or take another course of action.
- The COVID-19 Workforce Health Analysis Dashboard also automatically alerts managers about workers who have either received a red light signaling potential COVID-19 risk or have not yet completed the required COVID-19 Self-Assessment form.
- Concierges or greeters at workplaces can require employees to show the green light signal — or a red light signal with a resolution — on their mobile phones before entering the building.
We’re pretty excited about this new capability and hope that it will further enhance how Safety Managers can successfully protect employees while enabling the business to remain up and running.
