Technology Could Be the Answer to Effective Workforce : As the UK economy strives to get back on its feet, technology could be the answer to providing you with effective workforce controls for social distancing behaviour. Recently reported in the Safety & Health Practitioner, the most common issues that the HSE and local authority inspectors are finding include; failing to provide arrangements for monitoring, supervising, and maintaining social distancing.
Maintaining a distance of 1m or 2m between people is not normal human behaviour and yet coupled with good hygiene measures, is critical in preventing a second wave of the pandemic.
The good news is there is now a range of technologies available to help your employees maintain social distancing, reducing their risk of infection and of taking COVID-19 home to their families and community.
Some key considerations when reviewing what technology is best for your work environment.
- Ensure the technology will adequately alert users of their close proximity to others in real time. Alerts can be a combination of audio, sensory or visual – the more the better.
- Consider the practicalities of maintaining devices to be readily available for employees and visitors. On demand allocation reduces costs and brings assurances of availability over personal ownership.
- Ensure personal monitoring data is gathered and accessed within a GDPR controlled environment.
- All employee proximity data is personal data which should only be retained for the purpose it was collected. You need to be confident that you can assure your employees privacy with a system which is robust and resilient in the transmission and management of data.
- Does the system have the flexibility to identify cohort groups or barriered safe areas?
- Adequacy of detection range from proven technology versus less capable or unnecessary accuracy from novel technologies with compromised availability.
The more integrated the ecosystem to deliver proximity monitoring data as SAAS, the more confidently you can deliver a socially distanced workspace.
Manual controls of one-way systems and distance signage are useful reminders, as are devices which notify individuals of close proximity but how effective are they? Deploying robust and GDPR compliant monitoring with data analytics can directly give assurance of effective controls. Such a system will also deliver contact tracing to minimise lost skills and operational downtime while protecting reputational damage.
With around 4,000 personal wrist worn monitors deployed at 100 companies, contact Reactec to find out how SAFE-DISTANCE can deliver you a safer working environment.
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