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Millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered with millions more on the way. However, when can we expect the disruption of the pandemic to lessen so our organizations can function more normally? It may be longer than you think. According to a projection by McKinsey and Company, the highest probability that things get “back to normal” is about nine or ten months from now, in the Fall of 2021. There is some probability that it will take even longer. The McKinsey and Company chart below shows the projection.
Downloaded January 20, 2021 https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business
What this means is it’s time to stop waiting for an outside solution; it’s time to take the necessary action to protect the health of your people and your organization. This will be good for your organization and will help your wider community do its part to shorten the pandemic.
Many organizations don’t want to wait another nine or ten months for a solution. Additionally, many enterprises have been trying to track employee health and manage disruptions through their Human Resource Departments. Though they lack clear strategies or the right tools for the job.
Last week, Advanced Metrics hosted a webinar with panel of experts who discussed how to safeguard the health of your employees and the productivity of your organization. Here are highlights from the webinar and link so you can watch it.
Lives Versus Livelihoods
Managers are accustomed to balancing many considerations to insure the success and stability of their enterprises, but COVID-19 has thrown this out of balance. Managers must now balance lives versus livelihoods. They need to protect the health and safety of workers and employees must continue to bring home a paycheck. With the additional layer of implementing new return-to-work policies, work-from-home practices, social distancing, and personal protection equipment.
Another issue managers are facing is information versus privacy. They have to collect information to make decisions about who can work and who can’t, and they have to maintain employee privacy.
There is also simply the amount of work required to track the status of employees’ health and communicate clearly about what actions need to be taken.
It’s a lot and most organizations simply aren’t trained or equipped to do it effectively.
The Solution
Advanced Metrics offers a solution where leaders inside your organization can implement a COVID-19 Management Strategy supported by the right software. This strategy has three parts.
- Contact tracing: Everyone in your organization is asked to securely and confidentially report disease exposure. Their contacts can be traced to provide a view of who else might be at risk. This will also track who has received the vaccine.
- Symptom tracking across your teams: Individuals report their symptoms daily and receive notifications to help them plan when they can return to work or school. This means that you can clearly identify who’s sick, who needs to quarantine and what impact that will have on your operations.
- A return to work/school planning process: Data from users gets aggregated into reports that give leaders the information they need for planning – both to maintain operations and also to return to work or school.
This plan creates a controllable process around the best practices that we already know work: social distancing, hygiene, and quarantines. And it enables leaders at your organization to have a measurable impact on the health of your employees, or at least, to lessen the spread of illness within your organization so disruptions are minimized.
This strategy comes out of work we’ve been doing with Dr. Michael Levine, an Occupational Physician who works with large employers like paper mills.
The Role of Software
Software doesn’t prevent people from getting sick but it does help you manage them. Advanced Metrics has developed a web-based software platform called Qualo Healthy Pathways: COVID Edition which helps you manage all the decisions you need to make as an employer.
- Employee information remains secure, private and confidential.
- Data on exposure, quarantine and isolation is accurately tracked.
- Dashboard reports provide real-time summaries of what’s happening with employees across your enterprise.
- Your senior leadership team can make smart decisions about returns-to-work.
What’s Next for You?
If your enterprise is struggling with how to stay safe and productive, we’d like to help. Schedule a consulting call with our team and we can talk with you about:
- What you need to know about employee data security, privacy and compliance.
- How to create a cross-functional implementation committee to guide this effort and ensure its a success for you.
- What strategies you’ve been using. What works and what doesn’t.
- How other organizations like yours are coping with the disruption of COVID-19.
In the meantime, take a look at the webinar and share it with your colleagues: COVID-19 Management Strategy to Keep Employees Safe. Be well!