When Prioritizing Onsite Employees’ Health, Use a Flexible Tracking Solution

When the global vaccine rollout began in December 2020, many organizations, public and private, projected a safe return to the office by late 2021. But with the rise in COVID-19 cases that resulted from the Delta and Omicron variants, millions of people put these plans on hold, pushed them back, or otherwise adjusted. As vaccination rates have gone up, however, leadership for both the public and private sector are looking to return to “normal” and bring employees back onsite en masse for the first time since March 2020.

But, the evolution of the coronavirus and its many variants have changed the way the world defines “fully vaccinated.” Booster shots, once seen as a priority only for those facing a higher risk of contracting COVID-19 (like healthcare workers and the immunocompromised), are now a requirement for some organizations looking to bring employees back onsite.

Evolving vaccination requirements emphasize the need for management of onsite employee health and safety.

To maintain a safe and productive work environment, organizations will need to account for individual health and risk screenings for onsite employees, vaccination tracking, contact tracing, shift management, corporate policies, and remote work options where feasible. To simplify this process, organizations should consider a solution to manage workforce readiness. If your organization is undergoing a return to onsite work, you can easily manage workforce health and safety readiness by tracking the following critical data in a unified response hub: 

• Vaccination status - Track employee intent to get vaccinated and vaccination status, and define your workplace requirements for boosters. 

• Contact tracing - Track and respond to exposures and incidents with contact tracing and case management in keeping with CDC guidelines.

• Case management - Manage exceptions, testing results, and positive cases..

• Employee screening and certification - Provide employees, visitors, contractors, and anyone else onsite with a web or mobile interface for submitting and updating personal health and risk data.

• Capacity - Streamline scheduling with defined capacity limits and allow employees to plan ahead and reserve their workspaces.

Ensuring employees are able to socially distance, report potential exposures, and provide information on their vaccination status helps keep communication open between staff and leadership and lays the foundation for a safer return to work. 

Appian Workforce Safety: the intuitive way to manage workforce health and safety readiness.

To help businesses manage the safety of their return to work and maintain vigilance beyond the peak of the global pandemic, Appian created Workforce Safety. Appian Workforce Safety is the only solution with a unified, automated, and flexible approach for safely returning to onsite work and adjusting operations based on workforce vaccination status data. The unified response hub enables administrators to do these things:

• Track employee health and vaccination insights.
• Opt in to booster shot tracking.
• Monitor incidents and contact tracing across facilities.
• Automate return-to-work authorizations.
• Comply with company policies and government regulations.

Jeanette Cacciola, VP of Human Resources Operations at learning technology company HMH, chose to implement Workforce Safety to ensure measures taken to keep employees safe were streamlined and organized. She said this of the solution:

“There is nothing more important than the health and safety of our employees. We knew we needed a robust software solution to help us manage the complexities of returning people to the office. We chose Appian Workforce Safety because it’s easy to customize to our requirements, easy for our employees to use, and it centralizes all of the data we need while protecting the privacy of our employees’ personal information.”