Getting Back To Work Safely

As the battle against COVID-19 wages on, countries, cities and communities face enormous pressure to reopen and restart their economies. But in many ways, economic recovery depends on how quickly – and safely – individual companies, organizations and their employees can return to work.

As they embark on the reentry phase and step into what many are calling the “next normal,” leaders across every industry are looking for ways to elevate trust by managing health risks and implementing the right processes and procedures to ensure safe back-to-work conditions, where employees feel informed, confident and productive.

Computer vision technology can help turn these criteria into a working reality.

The Oosto team has been on the front-lines with our customers since the pandemic began. Over the last few months, we’ve had multiple conversations with business owners across many verticals and we’ve compiled a list of actionable steps these organizations are taking to reopen safely.

1/Minimize Surface Contamination

Surface contamination is one of the most common ways to spread infection, especially in high traffic areas. While placing hand sanitizers all over the office is certainly necessary nowadays in any workplace, this should be coupled with an aim to minimize surface contact.

2/Encourage Physical Distancing

We know that maintaining social distance is key to defeating the virus. This might seem simple, but because human beings are social by nature, enforcing distance is extremely difficult. Try to monitor high traffic spaces at peak socialization hours, like the kitchen during coffee breaks and lunch time.

3/Provide Easy Access to Remote Services

A good rule of thumb for returning to work is that whatever can be done remotely, should be done remotely. This helps minimize the number of people coming through the facility. The more flexibility people have between physical and online services, the lower the risk of overcrowding.

Nevertheless, to comply with strict privacy regulations and to keep your sensitive information safe, you must have a secure way to authenticate your audience. Choosing a privacy-conscious and accurate digital authentication provider is critical to accomplishing flexible accessibility without sacrificing security.

4/Divide and Conquer

It is recommended that workforces separate employees into teams, or capsules, with staggered schedules. For example, if you divide your team in half and configure workplace access so that the teams never come into contact with one another, risk of exposure and viral spread is significantly reduced. If an outbreak does occur within a team or pod, not everyone will have been exposed.

5/Managing Contractors and Visitors

It’s important to be aware of everyone in your space – including any contractors and visitors who enter your facility – and understand who they’ve been in contact with. Accurate contact tracing is critical to ensuring you can not only manage a contamination scenario but also prevent a full lockdown by informing and isolating only those who have been exposed – while keeping all other operations running.

Unfortunately, these 5 measures require hours of manpower to implement efficiently.

That’s why our customers carefully considered and ultimately chose to implement AI visual intelligence – a powerful and critical tool that’s become instrumental in helping organizations overcome these challenges.

Through our unified visual intelligence platform, Oosto offers four critical capabilities that are helping companies rethink safety and reimagine the way people access physical spaces and virtual services:

• Watchlist Alerting: Receive instant recognition notifications on any device based on the detection of known individuals in real-time or in historical footage
• Contact Tracing: Use historical footage to trace a known carrier and understand in real-time who they’ve come in contact with (and for how long) so that isolation decisions can be made
• Touchless Access Control: Create safe, seamless entry experiences with face recognition to provide contactless access that’s easy to customize by teams and zones
• Remote Authentication: Easily onboard and authenticate users, creating a frictionless and secure experience through an elegant and quick-to-deploy mobile SDK

COVID-19 and its impact on the global economy have intensified the speed at which businesses must adapt and respond to disruption. What we’ve heard from our customers around the world is that it also offers a unique opportunity for organizations to reimagine the workplace by creating better, faster and safer experiences for their onsite and virtual workforces – and in the process, build deeper trust and purpose for the long-term.

If you want to learn more about how other companies are preparing to reopen their operations, or need help planning for your organization’s return to work, reach out to us today. We’re here for you.