How Office and Building Managers Can Use Technology to Reopen Offices?
The way we interact with each other has changed dramatically over the last 2 months with the COVID-19 pandemics. As a result, many offices around the world became almost empty. How can we reopen the offices or buildings and minimize the risk of them becoming a source of infection?
The risk of infection increases with human density, commercial buildings are where people meet to work together and viruses spread quickly from surface to surface. As a result buildings can become a source of infection. How can we make offices safer while minimizing the impact on businesses’ bottom lines?
Social distancing is essential, but it can come at a cost to efficiency and getting work done. If we leave aside the whole home-office trend (which is great, yet will never be suitable for all businesses), technology can help to both create a safer environment with less transmissions as well as enable us to respond faster and more efficiently.
Let me outline some of the tools office and property managers have to reopen offices safely. They fall under 3 categories:
- Prevent to minimize the risk of infections
- Monitor to understand when an infection occurs
- Respond to mitigate the risk
1. Prevent
You’re most likely all too familiar with social distancing, frequent cleaning and other hygiene measures we are all living. This topic has been covered broadly, so let me leave this aside despite the fact they are indeed essential to keeping a healthy workplace.
On top of the basics above, technology can, among other things, help to get rid of many physical touchpoints for both employees as well as visitors:
- Mobile access can help to issue cards to employees without physical contact (or even any contact between property management and employees)
- Visitor management system operated by a receptionist instead of self check-in kiosks eliminates one device touched by hundreds people a day
- Invited visitors can use their phone instead of a visitor plastic cards (passed from hand to hand) to get in & out of the building
- Automated elevator call for both employees and visitors to a specific floor can remove that one button touched by nearly every person coming in to the building
Other ways to minimize risks include
- Established channels to collect maintenance requests from employees can enable company or property management to quickly respond to risks (inadequate cleaning, etc..)
- Physical environment control such as increased ventilation and optimal humidity are important. This is a topic on it’s own — so if you’re interested in it, there’s more reading here or here.
2. Monitor
While measuring individual visitor temperature with a handheld infrared thermometer may seem a bit too extreme unless your office is an airport or government agency, there are subtler ways to provide for better visitor experience and still minimize the risk.
Infrared cameras can be a reasonable alternative that’s hardly noticeable for the subjects, although it is hardly more than a screen test to identify outliers.
Keeping track of visitors and employees with a solid visitor and access management systems including the ability to merge data from the two are not only security requirements for many businesses, but also a foundation for your ability to later respond (see below) when an infection has occurred.
Same is true for the access management system — solid logs are a precondition to being able to warn other employees.
Last but not least, an established channel for property and company managers to stay in touch will come handy and help to act fast if infections occur.
3. Respond
No matter how much effort you or your building management put into prevention, you may end up with infections in your office or building.
While governments and other bodies around the world race to launch selective quarantines, for now the responsibility to inform people who should self-quarantine is mostly on individuals and businesses.
Does your visitor and building management system enable you to identify employees and building locations a guest (you’ve later learned was infected) visited to respond accordingly? And the other way around — can your company identify and inform visitors that met with an employee that had become infected? Solid visitor management system should do this in a way that’s respectful to both guests’ privacy and their time.
For property managers — do you have channels to inform employees in the building if an infection has occurred?
Conclusion
It seems possible that we will have to learn to co-exist with the corona virus for extended periods of time. After implementing basic sanitary precautions, implementing the processes and technology to prevent, monitor and respond to infections can be a next step for building and office managers to tackle.
It is likely an initiative for more than several weeks but well worth the effort as it decreases the chances of infection and ultimately makes the offices a better place for all of us.
Full disclosure: The author works for Sharry.tech, a prop-tech company providing smart building technologies and solutions including some of the above.
