Nearly all businesses have experienced an onslaught of disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and with workplace restrictions being lifted, comes new obstacles to face. As became clear during the transition to remote work, the businesses that stay successful during periods of massive change are ones that are agile, adaptable, and flexible. An organization’s IT health and progress on the path to digital transformation play a key role in determining if a business is to survive continued change.
As employees return to work, IT gains a new set of important responsibilities
A business’s IT department plays a vital role in orchestrating a complex return to work plan, and will need to quickly implement an overhaul of technological changes to ensure business continuity. Business leaders have already made their expectations clear— in a McKinsey & Company survey of executives and directors, 76% reported they are planning large scale technology and systems changes in their post-COVID workplaces, and that adaptive speed is where they place the most importance. This is with good reason, as the same research found that businesses quick to adapt consistently outperform their slower competitors.
As employees return to the workplace, IT workers will soon find themselves responsible for administering critical business functions. While they will need to continue ensuring that tools and technologies are in place to support remote and hybrid work environments, they will also be called upon to implement new systems and procedures to collect, record, and store employee health data, and enabling traceability and reporting protocols to keep a business both in compliance with local and national guidelines, and to keep all employees healthy and safe.
And most certainly, IT security will remain an essential priority, as legal experts like those at Holland & Knight indicate that even data collected on employees’ temperatures upon arrival to the workplace will need to be handled as confidential medical information, requiring a system to keep any such records as secure as possible. With all these factors considered, are IT workers prepared to handle instituting such massive changes, and can they do it quickly enough to ensure business continuity?
A comprehensive Return to Work solution can ensure IT workers stay efficient
Employing a ready-made, wholly managed Return to Work solution is an ideal solve to the complex problem that businesses face in balancing the need to adhere to local and national guidelines and keep employees safe, while not compromising the efficiency and productivity of their IT staff. A holistic solution to preparing the workplace and the workforce for the transition back to work, the Konica Minolta Return to Work solution eases the burden IT workers face in strategizing and managing health data collection, recording, storage, and reporting.
The solution leverages an exhaustive set of technologies and tools that provide an organization with the confidence that they are keeping their employees healthy and safe and enabling traceability and reporting, without taking their IT department’s focus away from other important activities.
The solution streamlines return to work procedures and manages deployment and monitoring in an easy 4-step process:
- Employees are notified to complete a Virtual Health Check before heading into the office.
- Mobotix Thermal Imaging Cameras measure employees’ temperatures upon arrival at work.
- Contactless Temperature Verification records and stores employee health check data, logging any results out of compliance in a Content Management System.
- Incident Management Reporting & Contact Tracing allows for the easy access and review of employee health data, making internal and external COVID reporting and contact tracing easy.
When managed by a single vendor, businesses benefit from the assurance that the workplace is well-equipped to safely welcome employees back to work, and that their IT department can focus on productivity and connectivity enablement.
Enhanced automation abilities offered by UKG reduce the IT burden even further
Konica Minolta has strategically partnered with UKG, a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, to provide maximum value for organizations preparing to return to the workplace. When jointly deploying the advanced technologies included in Konica Minolta’s Return to Work solution with Dimensions from UKG, organizations benefit from enhanced automation abilities that will help them in managing large workforces.
The integration of access control software and Workforce Dimensions allows for the automation of a host of time-consuming processes that would require more effort on the part of IT workers, such as identifying which employees should be completing self-report daily health forms, considering reported time off, and other rescheduling efforts. When employed in tandem, these solutions reduce the administrative burden of managing a return to work strategy, keeping an organization in compliance with regulations and guidelines while assuring its employees that they can safely return to work– minimizing the burden on IT workers.
Konica Minolta and UKG are dedicated to reducing the complexities of your return to work plan, ensuring your business stays agile and efficient. To learn more about the solutions that will ensure your operations teams can stay productive, visit Konica Minolta Technology Partner Marketplace.
The content from this blog is courtesy of Aaron Mounts, RVP, Global Clients at Konica Minolta Business Solutions USA. Rethink the Future of Work. Returning to work today and planning for tomorrow.
