With the White House’s Guidelines to Opening Up America Again, we will see a return to the office in phases. Only essential “in-office” employees will be returning to work for phase one. But how do you instate social/physical distancing practices as employees head back to the office?

You can easily execute the necessary staggering and physical distancing of employees and workspaces as they get back to the workplace using Forum, AgilQuest’s Workplace Management System, as shown below:

2. Group employees for certain workdays and workspaces. By putting employees into groups like A, B, or C, and only allowing Group A in on Mondays and Tuesdays or only allowing them to use floor one, and so on for the other groups, is an easy way to create physical distancing of workspaces and employees.

For example, if you are part of Group A, who can work in the office on Mondays and Tuesdays and on a certain side of the building, only the available spaces that fall under those criteria will be available to you. As seen in the images below:

Business rules, like groups and policies, can be changed and updated to follow along with your office setting, what works and what doesn’t, and the different phases of the Open America Again Policy.

3. Remove the need for additional touching. For now, and for the safety of your employees, touchscreens are out. But what’s the alternative? Using a QR code outside each conference room or workspace will allow employees to reserve the space with their cellphones without needing to touch any additional surfaces.

4. Offer a mobile app for employees to easily secure their workspace. Having access to an intuitive, workspace reservation app, gives employees the ability to reserve their physically distanced workspace before they get into the office. They’ll be able to reserve the workspaces available to them from home or the office and they can easily secure a workspace instantly with their app and a workspaces QR code. 

This quick video highlights the 5 ways you can physically distance your office to make the return a safe one.

There are a couple of reasons why monitoring what your office and employees are doing is important as you make your way back to the workplace.

1. Knowing who sat where and when and who they interacted with is necessary information especially if any of your employees found themselves sick in the days after being at the office.
2. Knowing which office spaces and conference rooms are being used most often makes it so you know 1) where cleaning services need to focus on and 2) what office spaces are available to use for the next phase of employees or what conference rooms can be repurposed for other uses.

Forum offers two tracer reports that fill those needs entirely plus a plethora of other reports for going forward.

Another report available, the Person Presence by Location report, provides a full list of who came into the building on a certain day or date range. 

Make sure you are gathering the data immediately so you can make ongoing decisions about how employees should be spaced or staggered, and to assist in alerting others of potential contact with positive COVID-19 test results.   

[Related Article: Back to the Workplace Use Cases]

It’s our goal to help you comply with OSHA’s new back to the workplace guidelines. You can find the full OSHA guide here.

Using the above information, setting up your office for physical distancing, and having the reports to keep everything managed, in order, and optimized, will get you through the different phases of getting back to the workplace and help you get to the “new normal.”