How to manage office access while social distancing

The Steer Workplace team

The pandemic of 2020 has ushered in a new age of office life, where traditional workspaces must operate under adaptive guidelines.

Evac One is geared towards helping organisations manage their safety obligations, protecting both their staff and their responsibilities as tenants. COVID-19 hasn’t removed the old obligations, but it has created new requirements that businesses must adhere to.

Maintaining social distancing

We’ve recently launched a priority access feature, which organisations can use to manage the return of employees to offices without compromising their health.

Social distancing is here to stay, and given the recommended medical guidelines few offices can operate at their pre-COVID capacity.

Evac One’s priority access system allows location managers to configure the capacity of each of their floors, allowing offices to be reopened whilst closely controlling entry numbers. Have to arrange frequent deep cleans? Simply reduce floor availability to zero for that day.

Prioritising availability

All team members can log in and request future access to a location, and this will be approved or denied automatically the day prior based on availability.

If your location has more requests than availability, we’ll calculate who is approved according to a simple five-point prioritisation scale, administered within the platform and specific to each location.

All staff are given a priority value that can be set as high for key on-site workers or low for those at an increased level of risk. You can mark team members as wardens or first aiders, to ensure you have enough on site on any given day, and highlight employees who would require special assistance in the event of an evacuation.

Automated communication

All requests and assignments are visible in real time by location managers, who can request access on behalf of employees, add or remove individuals manually, and amend floor priority and availability.

When access is allocated, affected users will be emailed with details and the specific floor they have been assigned to.

If you have multiple floors, they will be filled successively to prevent employees being isolated. Controlled distancing is crucial to tackle COVID-19, but this can’t come at the expense of building regulations. Evac One is set up to help organisations navigate their responsibilities to both staff and safety protocols.

Letting you focus on your business

In the upcoming weeks we’ll be rolling out advanced configuration options, including group restriction capability, the ability to assign people to specific or preferred floors, and more allocation options for managers.

As with everything in Evac One, plans are location specific, so they can be managed independently to suit any operational, geographical or spatial needs.

Preparation is just one aspect of ensuring your staff are protected, however. It’s just as important to be able to respond effectively, so we’ll be expanding access management to allow users to check-in when on-location.

As well as giving location managers oversight as to who is in the office – a key safety need – this will allow the system to execute contact tracing, so in the event of a positive diagnosis you can use Evac One to immediately identify exposed team members.

You can register for a free trial to Evac One here.