Flex SafeOps: Enabling a Seamless Back to Office Program
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a major disruption in all our lives – personal and professional. Organizations, across the world faced huge challenge in ensuring their workforce remain productive by ensuring the availability of the required tools and technologies, so that the employees could work from their homes. A fair percentage of employees feel the need to physical interaction and bonding, and we are seeing that employees are more eager and have started to return to their workplace in a phased manner. With sufficient availability of vaccines, and the waning threat of COVID-19, around the world, every country has started a mammoth scale operation to vaccinate their citizen and come up regulations with regards to the workplace protocols on dealing with the post pandemic activities. Every organization has now started charting out a plan and are implementing these protocols to help employees return to office safely. Tech Mahindra is at the forefront in dealing with this pandemic and is leveraging its extensive experience in Digital Workplace to consult and provide our clients with safe working environment to return to. Organizations will have to redesign their workspaces to ensure physical distancing, adoption of hybrid ways of working, focusing more on health and wellness of employees.
Tech Mahindra is helping our clients in their “return to work” journey - FLEX SafeOps, which includes a range of measures that can help client’s employees return to the office safely. FLEX SafeOps offers a complete 360-degree solution to assist employees returning to work. We envisage 4 stages of this –
Plan:
This is where we consult clients on the Government regulations that need to be followed, deep cleaning of offices and restructuring the workplace. We have a dedicated wellness officer, and our wellness office can consult clients on different aspects of wellness like mandatory trainings, employee communications, surveys etc.
Return:
Flex SafeOps offers the employees to book their seat using BookMySeat application before coming to the office, leading to a very optimized and efficient way of booking, and managing the seat allocation. Once the employee arrives at the office, internet of things (IoT) based parking visualizers can help the end user find parking slot without asking around. For visitors, the smart visitor management system will ensure no human intervention from arriving at the front desk to guiding the visitors to the conference rooms. At the entrance, the employees are screened using a thermal scanning system which can detect if the employee is having fever. This system is completely hands-free and can work from a distance of 3-8 feet. If the employee is diagnosed with high temperature, a secondary medical screening is done to ensure that there are no false positives or false negatives before the employee enters the office premises. IoT based smart sanitizer dispensing machines can be placed at common areas for employees to sanitize their hands.
Engage:
New employees who have joined the organization, can do self-service by picking up their new laptop from the office using TechM Plexdock solution, and the laptop will configured using Windows Autopilot to ensure that all the necessary applications are installed based on the employee’s persona mapping done by IT Admin. In case, the employee needs any help they can reach out to the IT support helpdesk over a phone, chat or simply logging ticket using an IT Service Management (ITSM) system all of which are deployed by Tech Mahindra. TechM can help organizations with self-heal and self-help solutions and ensure the overall end user experience is constantly managed and monitored using FLEX eXM (end user experience management) tools. For day-to-day collaboration needs, TechM can help deploy the latest collaboration tools for hybrid and remote collaboration,. The deployment and use of augmented realty and modern endpoint management solutions will significantly reduce the needs for field support and onsite dispatches.
New Status Quo:
The pandemic has also warranted organizations to consider 3 important aspects of wellness – physical, mental, and financial. TechM offers a dedicated wellness solution. For physical wellness, companies tie up with health/activity-based subscription apps and users can avail the subscription and choose to attach their physical activity tracker to these apps, providing actionable insights to the data collected by their devices. For the mental and financial wellbeing, we recommend usage of specialized chatbots, financial and mental wellness consulting and training from the wellness office, Regular trainings and wellness sessions, timely updates via multiple communications channels about the new government regulations and guidelines. Finally ensuring regular employee survey which can help organization keep track of the sentiments and make course corrections based on the feedback of their staff.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made a huge impact in every organization and in everyone’s lives and its imperative to carefully reshape the workplace which can help employees return to office with confidence.
About the author
Vaibhav Desai,
Practice Head of Digital Workplace Services, Tech Mahindra
Vaibhav Desai, is the Practice Head of Digital Workplace Services at Tech Mahindra, with over 18 years’ experience. He has deep curiosity and is passionate about digital solutions to enhance the way people work. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Commerce from Mumbai University.
