Managing the Return to Work Transition: Maintaining Optimal Operations Efficiency

Returning to the workplace is quickly becoming a reality for many workers across the nation.  But with the pandemic still remaining a high concern, employees tasked with ensuring safe return to work procedures and policies are left scrambling to ensure their organizations are prepared.

Preparing the workplace for employees’ return is a massive undertaking, but hugely important

Ensuring employees are comfortable with returning to work is a challenge.  A HR survey has indicated that 68% of employers surveyed were being met with cooperation challenges as they began recalling employees to the workplace.  With such hesitation to return to work, assuring employees that plans are in place to ensure their health will be protected is vital.

In fact, outside of having a widely available vaccine or FDA approved treatment for the virus, Bain & Company reports that the next best thing to ease employees’ concerns about returning to work is the assurance that new, effective safety measures are in place to keep them protected.  But getting these measures in place, or even identifying what measures must be taken, can seem like insurmountable tasks for those responsible.

What must operations employees do to ensure a smart return to work plan?

Prepping the workplace and reassuring employees that their health is the organization’s #1 priority requires a coordinated effort on the part of those across the operations spectrum, from HR, to legal, to facilities management and more.  These teams must work in tandem to ensure their organization’s return to work policies and practices are ironclad, will assuage any of their colleagues’ concerns about returning to the workplace, and of course, work effectively to keep everyone safe and healthy.  

There’s a long list of considerations operations workers must prepare for, including adherence to all local and national guidelines, workplace sanitation and disinfection, workplace entry security and space occupancy, maintaining traceability, enabling a prompt internal/external reporting structure, and more.  Instituting such a comprehensive return to work strategy is difficult, but an absolute necessity.

Consider an all-encompassing Return to Work solution to ease the operations burden

As the additional burden of managing their organization’s return to work strategy can consume a massive portion of operations staff’s time at the cost of organizational efficiency, an all-encompassing, ready-made solution is an ideal path forward.  Designed as a holistic solution to preparing the workplace and the workforce for the transition back to work, the Konica Minolta Return to Work solution is a comprehensive solve to a complex problem.

The solution leverages an exhaustive set of technologies and tools that provide an organization with the confidence that their return to work practices are rock-solid, without sacrificing the time and efficiency of their operations employees.

The solution reduces the pressure on operations workers, streamlining return to work procedures into an easy 4-step process:

1. Employees are notified to complete a Virtual Health Check before heading into the office.
2. Mobotix Thermal Imaging Cameras measure employees’ temperatures upon arrival at work.
3. Contactless Temperature Verification records and stores employee health check data, logging any results out of compliance in a Content Management System.
4. 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.

With these essential activities being managed by a single vendor, employers can rest assured that the workplace is well-equipped to safely allow employees back to work, without suffering the loss of efficiency and added investment of time the process requires of operations staff.

Even greater efficiency is achieved by enhancing automation abilities

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 typically fall to operations staff to manage manually, 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– all without doubling the workload of operations teams.

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.