The 2020 global pandemic COVID-19 forced businesses to act quickly to ensure the safety of their workforce. Many businesses closed temporarily or transitioned to remote work. The end of the Pandemic is uncertain, returning to physical workplace safely and productively is a high priority for many businesses. To ensure business continuity, businesses must plan a strong back-to-work strategy. Here we present a 3-point technological solution.

Monitor and Ensure Workplace Safety with Computer Vision

To ensure a safe workplace, it's critical for employees to follow safety guidelines, like social distancing and wearing proper PPE. The challenge is to continuously monitor employees to make sure they don't violate any of the guidelines and endanger or contaminate the environment. Utilizing a Computer Vision Solution to continuously monitor the workplace and alert management of any discrepancies can reduce the change of violations and ensure a safe workplace for all. 

Oftentimes, computer vision systems can be retrofitted over existing security cameras and is less expensive then manual inspection.

Monitor PPE and Social Distancing

AI-based computer vision facilitates real-time monitoring of the workplace environment and precisely locates if any deviation is detected. Dashboard analytics provided analysis of the environment and even suggests ways to improve. Businesses can be well informed about the risk projection and accordingly scale safety measures to effectively manage and instruct employees.

Automated Temperature Scanning with Thermal Imaging

Fever is one of the key indicators of COVID-19. As it is contagious, temperature screening should be done without being physically close to the individual. Adopting thermal imaging solutions can make accurate temperature measurements without having to be in close contact with anyone. Manually checking every individual coming into the office or within in the workplace is time consuming and not always accurate. Thermal detection cameras powered by AI algorithms can scan every individual and accurately detect employees with high temperatures and notifies management.

Ensure 24/7 Employee Support with Chatbots

The spread of misinformation and unclear guidelines puts people at risk of getting infected. When there is no single source of instruction and facts during these times, people will follow unauthorized sources. That's why it's critical for a company to deliver the right information at the right moment. A chatbot will do just that. And Chatbots can serve any number of employees in a single instance unlike human agents who can only serve one employee at a time. 

Here's how enterprise chatbots help:

• Offer better coordination among response teams
• Delivers real-time information and plan of action to employees
• Minimize employee concerns with 24/7 support to from any device
• Escalate issues to appropriate response teams 
• Resolve critical requests quickly without waiting on a human agent

Safety Management with Mobile Apps

Considering the severity of the pandemic, employees are apprehensive about how safe it is to return to work. In this situation, returning to the workplace requires businesses to come up with flexible and cross-functional workplace strategies that boost morale and build trust in employees. This is exactly what the ServiceNow Safe Workplace Mobile Apps suite does.

This mobile app suite enables organizations to have a structured approach to manage workflows regarding the health and safety of employees.  The Safe Workplace app suite provides four apps and a dashboard to manage and monitor steps taken to guarantee employee health and safety. The app suite has two categories:

Workforce Readiness Apps

• Employee Readiness Survey: Conduct surveys and capture employee responses.
• Employee Health Screening: Record health screening data and monitor workforce health trends. Dashboard analytics share overall trends and guide facility management teams.

Workplace Readiness Apps

• Workplace Safety Management: Manage and audit all safety activities, like assigning shifts to staff, Reserving office spaces, setting cleaning schedules and so on.
• Workplace PPE Inventory Management: Manage PPE Inventory and other critical supplies to keep office safe and sanitized.