Return To Work – The New Normal
The health and drug industry are already focusing on this catastrophic fallout more than ever, and you would wonder, apart from de-risking our employees (by allowing them to work from home and extended paid leaves, etc.), how are technology solution players contributing to this new challenge of returning back to work?
Most Return-to-Work solutions that are launched helps you assess how and when employees feel before they are ready to return to the workplace.
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- Understand each employee needs to make a safe and positive transition back to work.
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- Evaluate new policies organizations should adopt, including health and safety protocols, as offices and sites start reopening gradually.
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- Determine communication needs about any new changes to company direction or job functions and roles.
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- Back to Business solutions help organizations to enable customer confidence.
In fact, one of the leading Cloud CRM providers, Salesforce recently announced a bunch of initiatives helping businesses to return to work.
- Salesforce temporarily shut its offices and insisted on the workforce to “work from home” with whatever capacity possible.
- Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce pledged to retain the workforce for the longest time possible.
- Salesforce also collaborated with public sector companies and government offices in respective states and countries to enable them to fight and win the war against COVID-19 with solutions including Health cloud and Nonprofit cloud.
More importantly, Salesforce announced Work.com, a safe and agile way for companies to reopen, assures the employees and their work environment’s safety.
The latest work.com package includes workplace Command Center apps, Care products and is supported by the large ecosystem of partners like CRMIT Solutions. In addition, all the apps and capabilities coming with work.com are HIPAA compliant. Work.com applications include:
- Workplace Command Center (with Shift management, Employee assessment, Monitoring for safe return to work)
- Manual Contact Tracing (to minimize the spread of COVID-19)
- Emergency Response Management
- Rapid Crisis Response
- Workforce Reskilling
- Volunteer and Grants Management
So, this must be enough, right? Salesforce through a vast network of partners and ISVs support their customers and the Salesforce Ecosystem. In this fight against the dreadful COVID-19 pandemic, Salesforce is working in collaboration with its partners spread across the world to come up with innovative solutions and implementations.
As soon as the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, as a Salesforce partner CRMIT Solutions launched the COVID-19 ActNow Plug-in for Salesforce enabling
companies to address their needs to mitigate COVID-19 risks. The ActNow plugin is easy to install (2 days implementation cycle) generic app and works seamlessly with the Salesforce platform.
As I mentioned, the ActNow plugin complements the work.com platform (and is native to Salesforce) and is designed to help companies to self-assess the workforce and help them to return to work safely.
Here is how the ActNow plug-in works
Once installed, the plugin takes the employee data and the questionnaire as (the only) input and you are all set. The main components of the plugin are –
- The metadata (employee data, assessment questionnaire, and scoring)
- The Mailer
- The Symptom Checker, and
- The Dashboard
The employee data can be uploaded using the generic Salesforce bulk data loading capabilities and the assessments questionnaire are a configurable set of questions based on the WHO or CDC guidelines. Once the questionnaire is set, the mailer comes into action and preempts the employee to self-assess themselves.
The employees can take the self-assessment as per their convenience and the Symptom Checker (assessment engine) will suggest if there is any associated risk. The responses and risk scores are maintained with history in the salesforce.
In addition to the assessment, using the salesforce platform or via the links provided by the mailer, the HR Manager or employees can mark themself as a COVID-19 patient or update if they are living in the COVID- 19 hot spot zones.
From this point on the data in Salesforce can be used in many ways. Of course, the first and most obvious use case is to present it in a dashboard (the last component of ActNow plugin) to help the HR execs and Chief Health Officers (which is actually a thing now) of the companies to plan the employees return to work policy. In case the employees are working in the field with customers, the assessment results can be shared with prospective customers assuring their safety.
Did I mention the security? The employee’s data resides in the confined walls of salesforce and for the self-assessment, ActNow integrates with SSO services like google.
To summarize, following the Ohana culture of Salesforce, the ActNow Plugin with Work.com platform puts the employee & customer safety at the forefront of your organization’s response managing both proactive & reactive aspects of COVID-19 impact. It helps in extending the confidence and empathy to employees and customers, authorizing “return-to-work” policy and compliance.
With ActNow you can make business & safety decisions based on facts.
Lastly, now is this enough? Well, the answer is still No. It’s never enough when it comes to your employee’s safety. Also, Health Safety is not a single step, it is a journey, an evolution and we must evolve together from this situation. We will need to follow government guidelines and follow social distancing and get used to this “new normal”.
Tags: Customer360, ReturnToWork, Salesforce