s@w: a Solution to Help Companies to Manage the Post-COVID-19 Return to Work
Ensuring the safety of employees will be vital as the return to work continues. With this in mind, BCG Digital Ventures and BCG are introducing s@w, a comprehensive platform to help companies manage the return to the workplace.
The easing of the COVID-19 shutdown poses numerous challenges for companies and institutions. Ensuring the safety of employees will be vital as the return to work continues.
With s@w, BCG and BCG Digital Ventures (BCGDV) have developed a solution that helps companies ramp up after lockdown, protecting the health and safety of their employees and supporting them to reduce the risk of new virus outbreaks at work.
We caught up with BCGDV Global Managing Partner Stefan Groß-Selbeck, Michael Rüssmann, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, and BCG Partner and Managing Director Christoph Gauger to talk about the solution and how companies can use it to protect the health and safety of their teams.
What are the main challenges businesses have to face when slowly starting to ramp up again after COVID-19 shutdown?
Michael Rüssmann: The unprecedented situation of COVID-19 requires clear foresight for managing the ramping back up of operations and maintaining business continuity. In the coming months, further COVID-19 interventions are likely to occur, and companies will have to manage and support their workforces, ensuring health and safety. Currently, the processes of businesses’ COVID-19 task forces are very manual. A lot of time is lost and there is a high risk of error.
Stefan Groß-Selbeck: We talked to many of our corporate partners and gained insights into main challenges businesses are facing when ramping back up. Many companies have to manually control the physical presence of employees at locations literally via pen and paper. These manual processes continue when it comes to dealing with any employee who has an infection: Those who have been in contact with infected employees need to be traced and informed manually, and keeping track of the areas on site where infected employees were present and now require disinfection is also manual.
At the moment, this is done by humans, takes a lot of time, and bears a high risk of failure. And specially for larger corporates, another challenging aspect is the communication of COVID-19 updates. Not all employees use Slack and email — those who work in production, for example. However, they too need to be informed about changes in, to take one example, hygiene standards.
How exactly can s@w help COVID-19 task forces at companies?
Christoph Gauger: s@w is not only an application for tracing infection chains, but also a management solution that helps COVID-19 task forces in companies to act correctly and efficiently once an infection among the workforce becomes known. It helps to bundle targeted COVID-19 information in a newsfeed so employees are always up to date and don’t have to switch between different communication channels. With its self-reporting function, through which employees voluntarily report their health status, it helps to generate transparency over the COVID-19 status of the whole workforce, and supports close monitoring of critical skill resources and fast contingency plan execution. The QR code check-in function automates the pen-and-paper process of who was in the office when.
Tell us a bit more about the development process of the app.
Michael: We at BCG and BCGDV are in regular, close contact with our corporate partners and therefore have a very good understanding of the challenges they are facing when it comes to ramping back up their business. Our aim is to help them through the crisis as well as we can.
We decided to develop a tech solution to support managing COVID-19 once lockdown measures are loosened and more and more employees will return to offices and production areas. After the decision was made, a dedicated team of consultants and engineers from BCG and BCGDV kicked off scoping and first prototyping. They asked themselves: What will be the most relevant features for COVID-19 task forces and employees around the world? Which technologies will work best for detecting infection risks at the workplace? Multiple daily web conferences and the quickly growing team rapidly built concepts, click-dummies and tech demos. In only a few weeks time we drove the development and are in conversations with numerous businesses around the world who are interested in implementing the app.
Which technologies does the app use?
Stefan: The app uses QR codes, Bluetooth Low Energy, and we have extended our solution to also work with wearables — a particularly useful addition for factory workers. QR codes will be leveraged to allow employees to check into buildings or meeting rooms. If a positive or highly suspicious case is reported, the task force can react quickly by decontaminating the relevant office areas. Bluetooth Low Energy is used to connect the smartphone to other devices that are in close proximity. One way to take advantage of this feature is for the smartphone to register other smartphones in its vicinity. Through this, it is possible to gain insights on which people (more precisely: via their smartphones) are at risk of being part of a COVID-19 infection chain, and to notify them as quickly as possible to stop the infection chain.
Additionally, the technology can be used to notify smartphone users of when they are standing too close to a colleague — nudging employees to keep the social distancing guidelines in mind. As soon as the smartphone of users who have installed and activated the app detect other smartphones in their vicinity via Bluetooth, this information is stored privately on both devices. For factory workers who don’t own a smartphone or cannot take it to the factory floor, we propose wearables as an additional part of our solution.
With governments rolling out tracing apps for general public use, why do businesses need an extra app?
Michael: Decentralized public solutions do not provide any data or management functionality to corporates. s@w brings a tailored experience and functionality that is directly relevant to context of business. The app offers a communication channel related to COVID-19 topics. Employees can self-register their health status even before they have been tested formally. The app doesn’t just trace infection chains but also helps corporates to better manage infections in critical skill groups and departments. And companies can scale s@w across their operations, including all locations and countries. We think that s@w is the most comprehensive platform for enabling a safe return to work.
How does s@w address privacy and data security issues?
Stefan: s@w has a privacy-preserving usage concept. Personal information will only be required when a given use case depends on it (e.g., in the case of self-reporting a positive COVID-19 status). Only the most critical attributes are then requested; additional information is optional. Data protection mechanisms support privacy for employees. Individual reporting takes place on a voluntary basis. s@w is designed and built to respect data privacy and to follow the laws and regulations in the places where it will operate.
Who is currently using the solution?
Stefan: As mentioned earlier, we are already in contact with numerous companies around the world and have been experiencing a high level of interest since the start of our conversations. After all, companies are keen to ramp-up business, while ensuring health and safety of their employees is their highest priority.
Christoph: We are very happy that a European company with hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide has decided to support their ramp-up with our solution and co-develop with us, and there are also pilots taking place in North America. In addition, we are also implementing s@w in our own operations.
