| This content applies solely to Workforce Safety, which must be purchased separately from the Appian base platform. This content was written for Appian 21.4 and may not reflect the interfaces or functionality of other Appian versions. |
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations are working hard to return their workforce safely to the workplace. Human resource and crisis management teams are implementing return-to-work policies to ensure people are productive and safe while on site. Workforce Safety centralizes and automates the key needs of organizations into a single solution, by:
To help organizations get back to a new normal, Appian Workforce Safety provides all of these benefits and more.
Workforce Safety offers a wide-range of capabilities to give organizations the ability to respond to crisis situations and manage their return-to-work process.
The solution includes a central response hub that allows response management teams to safeguard the health and safety of their entire workforce in one location that's updated in real-time.
Appian Workforce Safety supports a safe, phased approach to returning your workforce to the the workplace using area capacity management and cohorting.
Do you want to limit the amount of people that are allowed in one floor or office area? Workforce Safety allows you to set capacity limits for each area. When users request a pass, they can see all of the areas that have capacity remaining, and they won't be able to request a pass for areas that are at capacity.
One of the latest CDC-recommended mitigation practices is called cohorting. Cohorting is basically assigning people to groups and keeping those groups together to limit contact with other groups. With Workforce Safety, you can assign departments to cohorts and determine which days of the week users can request a pass for. This not only helps limit the spread of COVID-19, but it also reduces the amount of passes that will be issued each day.
Workforce Safety makes workforce health screening fast and easy. Using a simple configurable check-in that can be taken on the web or mobile device, your employees can securely submit and update their personal health and risk information.
Whenever employees or external visitors intends to come on site, they use the simple web or mobile interface to request a pass to specific facility. During this process, they will be asked about their health and risk status to determine if it is safe for them to return. The smart, return-to-work functionality automatically authorizes on-site access based on the logic you create.
If their answers match the criteria you establish for pass eligibility, they are automatically granted a mobile pass for that day at the requested facility. Results are displayed as a mobile pass with a QR code and color-coded days on any handheld device for easy verification and access.
If their answers determine they are ineligible to receive a pass to for the facility, they will not be given a pass for that facility. Additionally, if they already have a valid pass for that facility, it will be revoked.
Organizations have full control of how vaccine information is captured, including what questions are asked and what data is required. Workforce Safety allows you to collect employee intent to get vaccinated, whether someone is partially or fully vaccinated, proof of vaccination, and dose dates.
As COVID-19 vaccines become more widely available, understanding the vaccination levels of your workforce will be critical in making future operations decisions. Appian Workforce Safety offers a flexible, user-friendly, and compliant way to collect, manage, and report on vaccine data.
You can ask users to report their vaccination status, including booster doses, and collect proof of vaccination. Users who are verified as fully vaccinated can also be granted special permissions, such as skipping pass request questions. You have control over which vaccination questions are asked, how messaging is phrased, and what information is required.
When a user is ready to provide their proof of vaccination, they can simply tap Upload in their Profile form and use their mobile device's camera to capture a photo of their vaccination proof or upload a file.
After a user has provided their proof of vaccination, response managers can quickly review the queue. If there are users in the review queue, a banner will appear in the INCIDENTS page indicating how many employees require verification.
When a response manager clicks Verify Proof of Vaccination, they are taken to a review portal. From this view, a response manager can quickly go through the employee queue and see all employees that submitted proof of vaccination, including any relevant information provided by the employee such as their most recent dose date, name, and vaccine name/manufacturer.
Employees can easily update their vaccination status and use their mobile phone to upload related documents or take a picture of their CDC-issued vaccination card. When it's time for an additional vaccine dose, users are reminded to update their vaccination status. All information is captured and stored safely in the Appian HIPAA-compliant Cloud.
Organizations also need a way to capture and track the exemption status of employees who are not required to get the COVID-19 vaccine because they qualify for a medical, religious, or other type of exemption.
With Workforce Safety, response managers can easily track which employees have a vaccination exemption by flagging their People record with an exemption indicator. This provides response managers with a way to easily capture exemption data and report which employees do not require vaccination because of their exemption status.
Response managers can use the filter on the People list by vaccination status to view a list of all employees that have an exemption.
On-site reservations allow organizations and employees to plan ahead by allowing employees to create a reservation for a facility ahead of time. Using Area Capacity Limits, organizations can configure capacity limits to encourage social distancing and employees can reserve specific workspaces when creating an on-site reservation.
To streamline the experience for your fully-vaccinated employees, you can enable auto-issuing passes, which provides fully-vaccinated employees their pass on the reservation date.
No matter the due diligence of an organization, exposures will inevitably happen. Responding quickly to positive cases is key to preventing and controlling an outbreak.
That's why Workforce Safety makes it easy to determine which people and areas have been exposed, as well as to notify exposed individuals.
Each day, users can log the people and areas that they had contact with that day. This means that as soon as a positive case is identified, there is already reliable contact tracing data that can be used to notify and isolate exposed individuals.
Contact tracing can even be enforced by requiring users to log this information before they are allowed to request another pass.
Any user who has been diagnosed with, is symptomatic of, or exposed to COVID-19 can report so in the app. This allows response managers to easily view key information such as:
Response managers can then take key actions on exposed contacts, such as notifying them via email, isolating them so that they quarantine, or requesting that they get tested.
Testing is one of the cornerstones of limiting the spread of COVID-19. Workforce Safety provides a way for response managers to enable and configure an automated process that sends out COVID-19 test requests to your employees who match the criteria set in the test frequency configuration at run-time.
You can easily configure the schedule and frequency of the automated test requests so that the process starts and ends on a specific date and repeats every set number of days based on a defined interval. You can also have the option to configure the schedule to run continuously.
When affected users log in to the Workforce Safety application, they'll receive a prompt to submit a COVID-19 test result.
For organizations who choose to offer their employees routine testing as an alternative to requiring them to get the COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment, this will help them effectively track and manage their entire workforce.
From the PEOPLE page, response managers can still manually request test results for a single employee or group of employees using REQUEST TESTS.
Note: Note that the POOLED TESTS feature is deprecated in Workforce Safety version 13 and later. If you are using POOLED TESTS in an earlier version of Workforce Safety and plan to upgrade to version 13, the solution will detect the feature on upgrade, allow you to continue to use the feature with your upgraded solution. Your pooled test data will also persist after upgrading your solution to version 13 or later.
Additionally, response managers can also provide test results for any employee, even if they don't have an active Pending Test Request from ACTIVITY > Individual Tests or the employee's People record.
Your workplace policy may require all employees to be fully vaccinated, submit a negative COVID-19 test result, or both before they can request a pass to come on site. No matter how you define your policy around employee pass requests, Workforce Safety's Block Pass Request feature enables you to tailor the solution to match your specific needs.
With Block Pass Requests, response managers can block employee from requesting a daily pass when they match certain criteria that makes them ineligible, like vaccination status, a positive COVID-19 test or no negative test result submitted, or both.
If the Enable On-Site Reservations feature is also enabled, blocked users that are ineligible due to their vaccination status, test status, or both will not be able to request an on-site reservation either.
When individuals have been diagnosed with, are symptomatic of, or exposed to COVID-19, they will automatically be placed in isolation with the creation of the COVID-19 isolation incident.
From this incident, response managers can track recovery progress, follow-up with the individual, request tests, and view their exposed contacts.
Isolated users will no longer be allowed to request a pass until they are taken out of isolation. Instead, they will be asked to complete an isolation update to let your organization know how they are doing.
See the Setup Guide for instructions on how to get up and running with the Workforce Safety solution.
To understand more about the solution's features and group security, see the User Guide.
