When employees begin to return to work, they’re going to be sceptical at first. For a large percentage of the workforce, employees have spent the past 6-8 months working from home, being told that it’s too much of a risk to venture back to the office.
As a result of the extensive time at home, employees have developed new routines, new ways of working, and essentially, a new lifestyle. While the big companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Slack, and PayPal have embraced this new way of working and announced that employees can permanently work from home, for many businesses, this type of model isn’t sustainable.
Meaning that at some point businesses will require employees to return to work.
Initially, this will cause adjustment issues for employees having to adapt to yet another lifestyle change. While these adjustment changes will mostly require employees to work through, there’s one big issue that businesses will need to address - restoring confidence in the workplace.
The need for employees to work from home stemmed from the fact that workplaces are busy and employees are in constant contact with other people, making it easy for COVID-19 to spread. Which has been the message constantly shared throughout the pandemic.
Sine can help with that transition and assist in creating a safer workplace for everyone in the workplace but before we get into that, let’s go over some of the guidelines that need to be followed to create a safer workplace.
Before employees return to work there are some basic guidelines that businesses must follow:
COVID-19 can spread if distancing isn’t in place. People should keep 1.5 meters apart. Some ways to enforce a 1.5-meter rule are:
Businesses need to supply various handwashing and hand sanitising stations around the workplace to allow employees to easily and constantly wash their hands throughout the day.
Cleaning isn’t entirely up to the employers but they should be providing services that regularly clean the workplace throughout the week. Businesses can also provide workstation cleaning products for employees to clean as regularly as they think is necessary.
Signage should be placed throughout the office to ensure all employees and visitors are aware of your business's COVID-19 procedures, limits on people in rooms, and any other health & safety information you need to present.
Find specific guideline information for your industry.
The above points cover the basics but they won’t restore confidence in the workplace. To do that, businesses need to go further and provide high levels of safety and even security for when employees begin to return to work.
Remember, most employees have been working from the safety of their home, where they have access to everything they need to remain safe.
With Sine, you can help provide reassurance to your employees that your workplace is safe and secure.
Sine allows you to:
Employees may check into the workplace in multiple different ways, some of which could be with swipe cards, sign-in sheets, or time cards. The problem with these check-in methods is that they all require multiple touchpoints and in some cases require the use of swipe cards. One key way of reducing the spread of COVID-19 is reducing the number of surfaces touched with a digital staff management system. With Sine, you can opt-in to alternative check-in solutions such as:
If you want to ensure the safety of your employees, you need to offer more than just a contactless check-in and ask yourself - what if the people checking in show symptoms of COVID-19? How can I stop them from arriving at the workplace?
The fix is to implement contact tracing before someone arrives at the workplace for both visitors and employees.
Using Sine’s Daily Check, you can prescreen everyone coming to your site using the Sine Pro mobile app for employees or invitations for visitors.
With Sine Daily Check, as someone plans to come to the workplace, they will be presented with a COVID-19 questionnaire which will capture COVID-critical information. Once completed, the request can be placed into a ‘pending’ state which an approver like a HR Manager can review and approve (or reject).
By using Sine Daily Check, you can ensure that the people who come to your workplace, whether their employees or visitors, don’t pose a risk to the safety of the workplace.
Businesses returning to work are adopting a shift-based model, where employees are allowed to work in the workplace on certain days on a rotation basis.
This is a great method for keeping numbers low and ensuring that the people in the workplace aren’t close to others.
Sine can be used to help manage the capacity of a workplace but clearly showing how many people are at a workplace at any given time using the workplace analytics feature.
Restoring confidence into the workplace is a task that many businesses will face. While there are basic regulations in place to ensure the safety of your employees, businesses need to go further to make employees feel safe when they do return to the workplace.
With Sine, businesses can introduce a contactless check-in system that can contact trace everyone who enters. You can book a demo here.
