Never before has the scenario been more precarious than the current times. Navigating through the COVID-19 and its aftermath is a challenge in itself. The COVID-19 is a worldwide pandemic that has had a consequential effect on everyone, including the large organizations. The most significant concern of businesses today is to keep the operations running while maintaining productivity and minimizing the risk to the workforce. Everything has changed, such as the way employees work, interact with the colleagues, manage tasks and other aspects to protect themselves from this infection.Safety has become a priority in the workplace. While safety is the new workplace norm, facilities or admin teams are looking for sustainable ways to ensure a safer environment.

The new responsibilities of facilities/admins

To navigate through the disruption and to ensure a safe return to the workplace, there are certain challenges that facilities/admin teams will face such as maintaining a safer environment while sustaining regular operations. This requires them to

• Act as the designated source for information on workplace safety.

Create safety policies at the workplace that limit the spread of this disease and protect all areas of their business.

• Assess and defer scheduled maintenance for non-essential assets.
• Accelerate digital transformation into all areas of their business

This essentially means putting new protocols in place, maintaining inventory control, sanitization drives, changing office layout, or improving employee schedules to suggest a few. The organizations will need to establish guidelines for deep cleaning tasks, track the number of employees and visitors for symptoms, and share a detailed report of this information with key members.The organizations that have access to accurate data about their facilities and their employees and visibility into continually monitoring their facilities and operations will be the ones to overcome the crisis.

Leveraging technology to empower facilities teams

While enterprises had started treading on the path of digital transformation, the global pandemic has emphasized the need to adopt technology across verticals. World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended certain safety measures to be followed by companies to ensure employee safety across locations.¹ This includes employee health status recording prior to joining, health screening at premises and social distancing and other hygienic measures. Therefore, the new workplace is going to bring in new sets of workplace norms such as:

Employee Health Status Recording (before joining) & their willingness to return

Employee health screening

Automated safety management

Automated inventory management

The answer to elevate efficiency and aid workforce and human intelligence while ensuring safety lies in the usage of emerging technologies. To help you streamline the process for the effective return of employees, SymphonyAI Summit introduces The Safe Workplace Enabler Suite. This Enabler Suite contains our enterprise service management tools powered by the latest advances in AI, machine reasoning, analytics, and automation. You can leverage these tools to gain insights into the data and make accurate decisions.SymphonyAI Summit Safe Workplace Enabler Suite helps facilities/admin teams to streamline several functions

Ready-to-execute workflows: The suite is powered by the advanced automation that assists to revamp your departments with health measures to have a safer working environment.

Accurate and real-time inventory management: It helps you manage and monitor the needs of the workplace to support the physical safety of your workforce with the PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) application

Leadership dashboard: You have access to a single-view dashboard through which you can gain insights and intelligence to make quick and accurate decisions regarding the health and safety of the employees and customers alike.

Returning to work in the current scenario poses challenges to both employees and facilitators. It therefore needs detailed planning and meticulous execution from the facilities team. This requires the facilities team to step up and embrace technology. With SymphonyAI Summit’s Safe Workplace Enabler Suite you can create and maintain a safer workplace while ensuring business continuity.For more information, download SymphonyAI Summit’s Safe Workplace Enabler Suite and build a safer working environment.

References

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/getting-workplace-ready-for-covid-19.pdf?ua=1