President Joe Biden recently announced sweeping mandates for vaccinations, impacting nearly a 100million American workers. The new delta-variant has continued to see numbers of covid infections surge, forcing the government to declare all private-sector employees, along with health care workers and federal contractors, to be vaccinated in order to go to work. But how can businesses manage to verify the vaccination of all contractors, visitors, and employees that enter their premises whilst continuing to carry out their day-to-day jobs?

Mandates present challenges for organizations and how they handle complying with them. In an ideal world, it would be as simple as adding another step in an already successful existing process to manage the movement of people in and out of an organization. However, many companies are still currently operating with labor-intensive manual processes, resulting in a slow and inefficient sign-in. By adding another step of validating a vaccine passport, the process slows down even further, highlighting the need for a seamless people presence management system to be in place.

How can a people-presence system help organizations manage visitors?

People presence solutions offer a pre-registration feature giving organizations the ability to know who is coming on-site before they arrive at your location and also conduct health screening of visitors to collect essential information in advance. This ensures that any visitors that do not meet company policy don’t come near your organization and put your employees at risk. Additionally, you can enable triggers to send out an email at a specific time before a visit, guaranteeing that your visitor’s health screening is as accurate and up-to-date as possible before coming on-site.           

If your organization has mandated vaccinations, or you have workers on-site that have been government-mandated to be vaccinated, using a pre-registration feature guarantees that visitors are vaccinated through a requirement to upload proof of vaccination. If the requirements are not met, notifications can be enabled to send to the host alerting them that they are not vaccinated and therefore, the meeting will have to be rescheduled or moved online. Furthermore, health screening can simply be included through the kiosk at entry on the day of the meeting, asking visitors to present and scan their vaccine passports.

People Presence solutions – WhosOnLocation

People presence management is a revolutionary way to manage more than just visitors or people coming on-site. Using this software you can measure and track movements around the site (for example, zone-to-zone movements) and even at off-site locations.

With people presence management, kiosks aren’t single-purpose sign-in / sign-out points. They become a tool for running inductions, a site hazard awareness resource or a checkpoint for qualifications and zone access permissions. Keep employees, visitors, and contractors safe with WhosOnLocation, a people presence system.

WhosOnLocation protecting contractors when coming on-site

WhosOnLocation allows your company to store qualifications and insurance documentation against each contractor profile or organization, ensuring the workers that are mandated to be vaccinated are granted entry. By verifying the vaccination status of each contractor that enters your building, it ensures that your employees are protected and that your organization stays compliant. The top concerns employees have about being back on-site are health and safety-related, highlighting the need to have all those that enter in line with your organization’s safety protocols.

How to protect your employees within your organization?

Employees have the ability to upload their vaccination passports into their employee profiles, granting them access to come on-site. All vaccinated employees will then be able to enter their offices, with our employee scheduling and desk booking feature, coming soon to WhosOnLocation, offering an additional safeguard to protect employees. The feature will give your employees the power to plan when they will be on-site and where they will be sitting to ensure you maintain your on-site policies and procedures. 

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My favorite feature of WhosOnLocation would have to be WolMobile, as it allows an easy way for my employer to track when I am on or offsite as well as a timestamp when I leave in case of an emergency. WolMobile is easy to use and is flexible to the requirements of our customers which I think is very important.

What’s something most people don’t know about you?

I am an Australian/New Zealand Rock n Roll Dancing Champion.

What’s your coffee order?

Large vanilla latte, sweet, caffeinated, and creamy, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Any podcasts/books/movies reccommedations?

The Secret Life of Bees, a movie set in the 1960s. It has themes including the irrationality of racism, the power of the female community, and the importance of storytelling, a must watch!

And lastly, what’s your Friday go-to lunch order?

It would be rude not to say the reliable, delicious, and filling Chicken Katsu Sushi. I can’t go past it on a Friday.

Managing your organisation in an emergency is no different. If you think about emergencies you and your organisation have had to manage in the past they generally come out of left-field and without warning. Knowing that you are protected not only gives your organisation, employees, and everyone in your duty of care peace of mind but ensures you are meeting your compliance obligations.

Why do we need emergency management software?

In the past, we may have managed an emergency situation in our workplace using pen and paper. While this, in theory, is good it does have its downfalls. What if the book that guests have signed into is forgotten as the building is evacuated? Or writing is illegible? 

Or someone spills coffee over the book so you can’t read the writing? 

These are all real possibilities when it comes to using a  manual emergency management system. Like your insurance policy, you can’t leave your emergency management to chance. Emergency management software is not only your insurance policy but also the way to ensure your organisation can easily manage and protect those in their duty of care. 

What is emergency management software?

Emergency management software allows you to remove manual processes and gives you the assurance that you can account for everyone in an emergency. 

The WhosOnLocation emergency management tool WolEvac gives you central access to people presence data and enables you to quickly and easily account for everyone in the event of an emergency.

WolEvac has a number of features to streamline and automate your emergency management from creating an event to clearing zones and communicating with your team. 

Evacuation event 

Quicky and easily create an evacuation event, for a particular area, zone, or your whole workplace. Invite Safety Marshalls to join and help manage the event.

Verify those on-site are safe

Safety Marshalls can verify those within their zone as they evacuate. Employees can also self verify so efforts can be focused on those who are unaccounted for. 

Clear zones

Get accurate and real-time reporting as Safety Marshall’s clear zones and verify employees are safe.

SMS messaging

Send an SMS to your employees and contractors asking them to self verify if they are safe or not. 

Forum chat

Communicate not only with other Safety Marshalls but also respond to the replies from the SMS message to make sure you can be as effective and efficient as possible with making sure everyone is safe.

Dashboard overview

An easy-to-understand and navigate overview of the event where all Safety Marshalls can see what the others are doing.

No matter the size of your organisation having an emergency management system and process in place is vital. You may not need it today, or tomorrow but when an emergency situation strikes you can have the confidence that you can protect everyone in your duty of care. To learn more about WolEvac watch our full video here or book a demo.

Our new Help Center is available right now – jump into the Help Center and check out the simplified design, faster search and refined structure yourself. It can also be accessed through the WhosOnLocation app, WolMobile, and the Contractor Portal, ensuring all users can benefit from the resources available.  And if you don’t find what you are looking for or want to know more, just reach out using the “Contact support” button at the top of each article.

Help Center or Customer support?

Our Help Center provides the quickest response to all your queries. Just start typing your question and you’ll see search suggestions and popular answers appearing below. Articles within our Help Center also aim to be as comprehensive as possible, providing in-depth step-by-step guides in each article.

How can the Help Center help you?

The Help Center provides support to your organization to ensure every member stays across any product improvements or advancements through the new ‘Product Updates’ page. 

Additionally, the Help Center offers over 500 articles covering our features, everyday tasks you may need help with, and common troubleshooting tips for ease of use. Our step-by-step structure which includes screenshots ensures the process is as easy and simple to follow along as possible. Whether you’re a location administrator, have contractors accessing the portal, or an employee of your organization registering visitors, we have articles tailored for your experience.

It is fair to say that lockdown in the UK has been a strange and testing time with over 35% of Brits doing some form of working from home. However, with lockdown restrictions easing since 19 July 2021 people are starting to return to their workplaces, but with this comes a big challenge that businesses face in adapting office environments to a different way of working.  

But with over five million people fearing returning to work what will this look like? Without a doubt, there will be plenty of new safety protocols involving strict personal hygiene and physical distancing, but how do we make this transition as simple and as safe as possible?  

As employers, we are all navigating a different territory. The workplace we left many months ago is unlikely to be the same when we return. We haven’t experienced anything like this before, most organizations don’t have plans in place on how to return to the workplace and if they do, they haven’t been tested and in these unprecedented times the reality is likely to be very different.

Using technology to keep your employees safe

Companies across the UK face so many challenges when it comes to opening their offices again, it can be hard to know the best way to ensure employee welfare is maintained.  We’ve pulled together the top 4 features to look out for in any people presence software:

Employee and guest screening

Screening all employees and guests before they come on-site ensures only those that meet your on-site criteria are granted access. Giving you and your employees confidence that only those people who meet your organizations wellness criteria are able to gain access.

It’s also incredibly beneficial to get alerted when you encounter a person who does not meet your criteria so they can be added to a watchlist and automatically denied should they attempt to gain access.

Touchless sign in/out

The less surfaces we all touch in the workplace the better for slowing the spread of germs. Ensure your software has the option for employees and guests to enter and exit your location using a touchless kiosk, QR code poster, mobile app or via the front of house team. These systems reduce health risks, improve overall hygiene, and create peace of mind for anyone entering or exiting your organization.

On-site policy acknowledgement

To maintain the highest level of hygiene for your employees and guests. Having the ability to ask everyone entering your location to read and acknowledge your onsite policies. This could be as simple as asking them to agree that they will use hand sanitiser or keep 2 meters from another person. Ensure that any question not answered correctly someone in your team can be notified and access to denied.

Limit numbers on-site

Automatically set the number of people allowed to be on-site at any one time rather than leaving it up to an individual. This feature removes the responsibility on the  front of house team or security team ensuring anyone attempting to gain access when on-site numbers are met are denied and one of your employees are notified. A great feature for managing on-site social distancing.

WhosOnLocation offers these and other features to help you keep your organization and those within it safe and secure. Click here to learn more.

1. Working from home allows employees to complete uninterrupted work, avoiding distractions that would usually occur within an office. On average, remote workers are 20-25% more effective when working at home, emphasizing the success of spending a few days a week at home.
2. Employers have more time to spend on their own mental health and wellbeing after avoiding commutes to and from work each day, greatly increasing their spare recreational time with family and friends.
3. Flexible work hours, as employees have the ability to choose the hours they work whilst still ensuring they complete their dedicated 8 hours.
4. Office spaces can be transformed into more collaborative areas for when employees come into the office, helping to provide the sense of ‘team’ when they are all together.
5. An increased emphasis on productivity rather than efficiency. Management has switched its focus to supporting team members with the resources they need to complete a project rather than viewing it as simply hours inputted equalling to work output 
6. Increased savings for employers as office space is required less, therefore decreasing the amount spent on rental costs. Additionally, employees are also saving as they are now spending less time and money on a commute to work

New to WhosOnLocation?

Get started with a FREE 30-day trial today. No credit card required.

Tip: As a back up we recommend having your government QR code poster displayed in your reception and at all entry points for those who can’t sign in using a smartphone.

Option 3 – QR code poster

If you don’t want to make changes to your kiosk sign in process or only use our QR code posters, we have a poster option available. When an employee or guest arrives on-site they will need to follow the steps on the poster:

• Scan the government QR code. 
• Scan the WhosOnLocation QR code and enter their details, answering any questions required to complete your normal sign-in process. 

To add your unique QR codes and branding to the poster we have created a design file you can edit.

Commonly asked questions

What if I already use a visitor management system can’t I provide a report from this? Unfortunately, the new rules require organizations to use government-issued QR code. Remember, the government contact tracing systems are not visitor management systems. They do not ask visitors to select a host, they do not capture other information like vehicle parking details, or ask the visitor to sign waivers or NDA’s or any of the other common visitor management workflows. 

Your visitor management system will give you detailed information of who came on-site and who they met with, it’s important to remember the government does not want to have to look through every organization’s visitor management reporting, which will differ from customer to customer.

Do any people presence systems integrate with the government-issued QR codes? Not with the government-mandated QR code systems, we are aware of. 

Will WhosOnLocation be integrated with the government-issued QR code systems? No, the government-mandated QR codes are intended for government contact tracing only. This is to help officials easily track and contain an outbreak from a single system. However, you can use the government-issued QR code service alongside WhosOnLocation. 

Need help getting set up or have additional questions?

Please reach out to our friendly Support Team.

A vast majority of employees surveyed voiced opinions of their desire to regain daily interaction with colleagues, along with wanting to maintain relationships with clients and stakeholders. However, to return safely to the workplace, protective measures will need to be considered to ensure that each worker feels safe and comfortable in their office environment. How can Whosonlocation help?

Daily contract tracing

Contract tracing is a core disease control measure, helping to prevent further transmission of the virus by quickly identifying and notifying people who may be infected and contagious. 

Whosonlocation has the ability to track all individuals who have entered the building in one day, and therefore the employer can notify any individual who came in contact with an infected person in their building.

Limiting number of people on site

39% of respondents indicated that limiting the number of individuals onsite would also ease concerns of returning to the workplace, ensuring that social distancing occurred. With Whosonlocation, employers can set a maximum occupancy to limit the number of people that are permitted on-site, and once the limit is reached any further attempts to sign in will fail.

With features like contract tracing and limiting the number of occupants in a workplace, employees can return with confidence that they will remain safe throughout this continuing pandemic. This enables collaboration and connection between workers to resume, with CEO of Apple expressing that working from home is “not like being together physically… I can’t wait for everybody to be able to come back into the office.”

Touchless entry/exit

Touchless entry and exit reduces the spread of germs by eliminating the risk of transmission through high-touch surfaces, with Whosonocation offering touchless entry for employees, contractors, and visitors. 30% of respondents indicated that touch-free sign-in and out would be highly valued, helping to minimize the risk of spreading the virus, and reducing wait times. Visitors will have the ability to sign in using our WolMobile app or scan a QR code and sign in from their smartphone’s browser. No app download required.

Part three of this series focuses on a hybrid workplace, follow along to hear how Whosonlocation can help your company

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