COVID-19 Compliance with HyperLocal

Resuming business as the risk of Covid19 recedes; there are still many challenges to face. Here’s how you can return to work while abiding with the safety measures against Covid19.

Company buses can be risky environment considering the number of people traveling together in close quarters.  The solution –

Employees Boarding Bus for the Plant

• Using ID Cards, we can check for the number of people on the bus. This can ensure that there are no more people on a bus than actually allowed.
• A sensor near placed next to the sanitizer will check if each employee has sanitized their hands while boarding the bus.

Employees need to follow certain protocols while entering or exiting the premises of the company. This type of workplace monitoring will reduce the risk of admitting any infected individual in and avoiding unnecessary contact amongst employees.

Employees Entering the Plant

• A thermal sensor attached to a transmitter can take the employee details while taking the temperature and record the temperature at entry and at the exit. This activity could be done several times a day.
• An algorithm in the backend could review these readings of a person and report any anomaly immediately (this is in case where the employee is taking any kind of medication to suppress the temperature).

Attendance Should Not be Biometric

• Manual attendance possesses the same kind of risk as a biometric; as the attendance book, the pen, etc. can be contaminated.
• A Bluetooth based, contactless iCard can solve this issue of attendance not only at the entry and exit but also check for efficiency throughout the day.
• Efficiency is the function of total hours at the work-station divided by the total available hours into 100.

Staggering of Shift Timings to Avoid Mingling

• This can be done using access-controlled doors that will only open using the ID cards. Thus, the process of not allowing people to enter the plant before the shift time can easily be adhered to.
• In the absence of the access-controlled doors, this system will immediately and automatically raise an incident if an employee comes in before the shift time

As employees return to work, there will be a lot of people sharing space there is bound to be some risk of contaminated surfaces. Therefore, one of the most important requirements is a clean and sanitized work environment to ensure safety of employees.

Common Areas Need to be Sanitized Every Few Hours

• Keeping track of the cleaner’s dwell time in a particular shared area can give the data on the cleanliness.
• There is no need to fill sheets and stick on the wall. Just random physical scrutiny of the shared areas is enough to maintain discipline in cleaning.
• So, if a canteen would ideally require 1 hour to be cleaned, the cleaner’s dwell time in the canteen is a good yardstick to measure if the cleaning has been done.

Keep a Record of Hand Wash Every Few Hours

• A receiver could be placed at every hand wash area or near sanitization areas.
• This receiver could receive the signals every time an employee comes to the area and keep a count
• If the employee does not wash according to the set process, an incident could be raised and name(s) flashed on the nearby screen.

This is the new norm, it is the best way to avoid the spread of coronavirus at workplace. So how do we maintain social distancing at work?

Prevent Overcrowding and Ensure Social Distancing in Washrooms

• Placing receivers in the washrooms can help with counting the number of people in washrooms.
• Ensuring social distancing at work may not be possible physically, but ensuring not more than a set number of people are using the washrooms at any point in time can easily be done using ID cards.

Making Sure Training & Meeting Rooms Maintain Protocol

• Organizations need to make sure that e-Trainings and e-Meetings are encouraged, but where this is not possible; protocol can be set for a max number of people that can be seated in a training/meeting room.
• The system can raise an alarm if the number of people protocol for social distancing at work is not followed. This will help in ensuring that the process is followed.

Stagger Lunch Time in Canteens

• Once a policy has been made to ensure proper lunchtimes are allotted for all employees from all departments, enforcing the policy will require a lot of manual supervision.
• With workplace monitoring of employees in Hyper-Local ID Cards, it will be easy to spot a person who should not be in the canteen at that time.

In case of contamination, it might be difficult to pinpoint where it started or which places need to be avoided. Tracing and recording individual activity will be quite useful in such cases.

Is Traceability Maintained for People Entering the Site?

• It is now very important to make sure that visitors entering the site are tracked, are meeting only the person they are supposed to meet and are not loitering in any other areas.
• By assigning the visitor an iCard it could be very simple to track and the hyper decision framework would alert if the geo-fence has been broken.

In Case of a Positive Case, Can You Back Trace the Areas of Contamination?

• It is IMPOSSIBLE to keep a record of all the places the employee has visited so that a list of contaminated areas and the people that visited that area during that time span can be made.
• But, if all the employees are wearing the iCard, it is possible to easily identify contaminated areas and list the people who need to be quarantined, instead of just shutting down the whole company.

In these uncertain times, it is better to be prepared for any kind of situation. This will prove helpful in case of emergency or unforeseen circumstances.

What Should Be Done if COVID +Ve Case is Found?

It is important to lay down the policy and procedure to handle the COVID +Ve case but without data on traceability, there would be no recourse but to shut down the operations.

• By maintaining a record of all the temperatures of all employees throughout the day, and running an algorithm to check for anomalies, it will be possible to detect an issue in advance.
• You could only quarantine those people who either came in contact with the person and the areas that were contaminated.

Can a Mock Test be Done to Check for Readiness?

• Yes, a mock test can easily be done by hypothetically identifying an individual and putting the employee id in the application.
• The application within a few minutes will list down all the contaminated zones and the people who either came in contact with the person or in contact with the contaminated zone during a particular time.

One might think, would it not be great to have a solution which could enable an office or unit to implement all the above measures and monitor their effectiveness. Here is one such solution which will help monitor social distancing in the workplace!!!