Getting your teams back to into the office in the post-COVID-19 world safely is essential, but it certainly won’t be a straightforward task. Keeping workers socially distant, keeping shared workstations and meeting rooms clean, and convincing your workforce that they’re safe to come into the office must all be managed effectively, every single day.
On top of all the usual administrative burdens of running a modern workplace, this could easily be a nightmare to control. So any workplace solutions and tools you can leverage to manage this phased return to work will be of great value; and this is where technology has a vital role to play.
Technology that talks the talk and walks the walk
The challenges ahead are so numerous and complex that technology is the only realistically viable solution for creating a safe working environment. That’s because it can join the dots of who works where, when and with whom, and enable all the functions and processes that must be conducted to enable maximum safe use of the building and facilities.
These include:
- Workplace scheduling: which days employees work at the office, the hours they’re working, and the workstations they’re working from.
- Space and capacity: which workstations are available when, and which ones are blocked off as part of social distancing measures.
- Contact tracing: who has come near to whom within the building, and who needs to be alerted and isolated if a person becomes infected or shows any symptoms.
- Sanitization: who is booked to use workstations at different times, and allowing time for full cleaning between uses by different people.
- Employee flexibility: who needs to work from home on certain days for personal or family reasons, and enabling a return to work strategy that takes this into account.
A fully integrated technology-based solution can effectively manage these workspace and employee needs in a post-COVID-19 climate; and is a topic delved into more in this recent return to the office webinar:
Your best investment of 2020?
Investing in this kind of technology now will pay off not only in the short-term, but in the long-term, too.
As you prepare to start bringing employees back into the office, technology allows you to start on the front foot, and maximize productivity by operating your office at its largest safe capacity straight away. That can potentially generate knock-on benefits of first-mover advantage in returning your business back to normal before your competitors can, and can make your employees feel more confident in your leadership and in the safety of their working environment.
That’s why there’s no time to lose in putting these measures in place now. The months and years ahead are likely to be tough enough for business as it is, without extra difficulties around the return to work and social distancing measures making it even harder. Enterprises that can show the most agile response and greatest resilience against the challenges of the pandemic will be better-placed for ongoing viability and profitability.
A tech solution, built on experience
At Condeco, we’ve drawn on all 15 years of our expertise to create a winning formula for managing workspaces big and small in the post-COVID-19 era. We’ve adapted our market-leading offerings around desk and meeting room management to develop a solution that perfectly complements a phased return to work. For example:
- Need to limit office attendance? Desks can be blocked off in the software, employees can be booked in according to their shift patterns, and staff can see exactly when and where they’ll be working on their mobile app before they even leave home.
- Want to ensure full sanitization? Time slots for cleaning teams to sanitize spaces between uses can be scheduled in just as employee shifts are. These blocks ensure nobody can come into a workstation straight after the previous user, and the software generates a sanitization schedule for your cleaners.
- Worried about proximity in meeting rooms? The software can take into account reduced capacity of meeting spaces, based on how many people can fit into each one under social distancing measures. When meetings are booked, the software won’t allow those attendee limits to be breached.
Nobody is under any illusion that the return to work is going to involve a certain level of compromise. But with the power of a reputable workspace scheduling technology, you can relieve the stress, reduce the risk and lessen the threat to your business that the ‘new normal’ might pose.
And in a business world set to undergo revolutionary change in the months and years ahead, it’ll put you in pole position to adapt and evolve for a brighter future.
