Returning to work: 5 Key Safety Measures to Prevent an Outbreak in the Workplace
It’s a new year but the same new normal. The need for businesses to track individuals arriving on their premises is still high, and has unique circumstances specific to visitor management and access control. As we continue to move forward, it’s important for businesses to implement measures that keep employees safe, reducing the risk of exposure in the workplace.
HERE ARE THE 5 KEY SAFETY MEASURES TO IMPLEMENT IN YOUR FACILITY:
1. Pre-screening Prior to Arrival
The first step to an effective safety plan in your workplace is prevention. Visitors should be pre-screened before they arrive in order to assess their potential health risk to your work environment. This ensures that at-risk individuals are not permitted to enter your workplace, eliminating possible exposure to your employees. Pre-screening can include collecting information about an individual’s recent travel history, questions about possible symptoms, and confirming they have not been exposed to anyone who has tested positive.
ATG Digital makes pre-screening easy with mandatory workflows that visitors are required to complete prior to their arrival. Should an individual be identified as a potential risk, it is recommended to block their entry and send a notification to the host to reschedule or cancel the meeting.
2. Screening Upon Arrival
When visitors or contractors arrive at your premises, it’s important to take precautions to ensure that they are fit to enter without exposing your workplace to unintentional health risks. There are 2 main ways of achieving this:
The first is a mandatory pre-screening, similar to that completed prior to arrival. This is a series of questions to help identify the level of risk an individual may pose. Should they not pass the mandatory requirements set by your management, the individual should be asked to return at a later date.
The second is to actually verify absence of symptoms, such as elevated body temperature – which is a key first indicator of a potential infection.
3. Touchless Sign-In Experience
Your access point contains some of the highest-used surfaces in your workplace, whether it be on the paper log book at the gate or at the desk in reception and this increases the risk of spreading germs, particularly in high traffic facilities where regular sanitization is difficult to maintain. By introducing touchless technologies at all access points, organizations are able to reduce physical touchpoints and better safeguard their workplace.
The standard approach of using logbooks or sign-in kiosks is no longer ideal in the new normal. This is why ATG Digital designed touchless sign-in solutions, by scanning your licence or QR code, it creates a completely contactless solution for visitor and contractor processing, while still logging all the important data you need for security reasons.
4. Facilitating Social Distancing
Your reception area is typically your busiest area, which every person entering your building passes through on a daily basis. Reducing wait times in your front reception and eliminating visitor interaction with employees, is a key factor in facilitating social distancing. It reduces the total number people in the same environment at any given time, and only engages employees once the visitor has been adequately screened.
ATG’s Pre-Registration expedites visitor processing by allowing quick check-ins and creating a more streamlined flow of traffic through your facility. It allows visitors to conveniently complete key components of the sign-in process prior to their arrival, ensuring that digital signatures, NDAs, safety videos, and other requirements are already finished by the time visitors arrive on-site.
Visitors who are unable to use Pre-Registration, can still use the At Reception device with the touchless scan QR code feature, without the need of any employee interaction.
5. Automating Contact Tracing
Visitor management doesn’t stop after the individual leaves your facility, and with health risks being a major concern, it’s particularly important to keep track of who has been in your building and which employees they have interacted with. In the event that someone who visited your facility poses a health risk, it’s crucial that you are able to inform the employees who might have potentially been exposed and advise them to get tested.
ATG Digital automatically logs data and timestamps the individual arrival times as a part of the regular visitor management process. While these records are kept primarily for security, compliance, and audit purposes – this information is now also being used for contact tracing. Should an incident occur, the ATG backend retains detailed visitor logs to provide you a digital and auditable trail of everyone who has accessed your facility during a specific timeframe, helping you pinpoint which individuals may have been affected.
ATG Digital helps businesses transition to the new normal without burdening business operations with newly implemented and time-consuming health and safety measures. Using automation places technology as the first line of defence, not people. This greatly reduces the employee training needed and enforces an effective barrier which only triggers intervention when exceptions are detected. The smart tools integrate seamlessly into one easy-to-use system to streamline and expedite visitor sign-ins.
From discreet symptom checking, to touchless sign-ins – ATG makes it easy for your organization to implement best-practice measures for controlling access to your facilities in order to better safeguard your employees.
To learn more about ATG Digital’s Tools for the New Normal, book a demo today.