Your Employee Safety Questions Explained: How to Use Your Workforce Management Solution to Protect Your People

As we look ahead past a prolonged period of uncertainty, our world’s “new normal” becomes more and more solidified as businesses adjust to the realities of operating in a re-defined environment. Navigating the unfamiliarity is no easy feat, and it seems as though every organization is dealing with the same problem: adjusting their practices to get employees back to work as safely as possible amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

The big question on everyone’s mind is how to best create a safe, productive environment for their workforce. Safety involves a lot of intertwining elements: making sure that sick employees are not coming to work, reducing the number of touch points in and around the workplace, and being able to accurately detect and address exposure issues when they arise.

As you continue to review and revise your return-to-work processes, you likely have encountered numerous issues while transitioning to a system that protects your employee’s health and wellbeing above anything else. The following are three key questions you should be asking yourself right now—regarding secure pre-shift health screenings, clocking practices, and availability of meaningful data—and how your workforce management solution can help solve those issues.

How can I make sure only healthy employees are working?

Employee safety begins before the start of the shift. As your first line of defense, minimize exposure risk by implementing automated pre-shift health screenings so that employees are required to complete a health survey before setting foot on the premises. Once employees are cleared via pre-shift health screenings, use access point screenings as an added layer of protection. This includes verification of employee temperatures, whether through thermal cameras, handheld temperature scanners, or other reliable methods. In tandem, these protocols will help you avoid having sick employees in the workplace, and expediting the process with real-time validation of successful health screenings means that your employees won’t lose valuable time on the clock.  

How can I reduce the number of touch points where possible?

You’ll want to incorporate screening solutions as early as possible to provide a safe environment for the people in your facilities, but it’s also essential to reduce contact with shared systems like time clocks. Proximity badges area great solution for identifying employees without requiring users to enter IDs or use badges that physically contact the clock. Additionally, selecting transactions via auto-detection will infer the transaction for the user instead of requiring a specific selection. In conjunction with appropriate use of protective equipment, proximity badges or mobile options can eliminate physical touch points in the clocking process entirely.

Keep in mind that time theft may still be a challenge for many organizations. To protect your business without the need for fingerprint biometrics, try using image capture features to store a photo of the employee to the timesheet for a supervisor to review at a later time.

How can I use my data to help?

Utilizing your data presents an excellent opportunity to adjust your processes as they pertain to your specific scheduling needs. Visualizing your schedules as a heat map will help you identify peak periods throughout the day where employees will be starting work, finishing work, taking breaks, and more. These hot spots are the most important times to consider staggering shifts and breaks among your workforce. Data from your screening process is also extremely valuable to in the unfortunate event of a positive COVID-19 case. You can perform contact tracing by looking back across previous shifts to identify coworkers who may have come in contact with the positive COVID-19 case. Alert these at-risk individuals and provide helpful next steps to reduce further spread among your workforce.

Your workforce management solution can help.

The concept of successfully operating in a “new normal” doesn’t have to feel out of reach with the right workforce management solution to help you get there. The WorkForce Suite’s robust capabilities support automated pre-shift health screenings, contactless clocking, and contact tracing efforts to ensure the safety of your organization’s most important asset: your people. Learn more about how WorkForce Software is getting the world back to work.