At this time, when public health safety is a primary concern, facilities management companies have an added responsibility to make sure that the facilities that they manage do not become hazards to public health. Facilities management companies have followed protocols in the past that help keep facilities clean and safe but now they need to follow even more rigorous procedures to ensure that facilities do not become breeding grounds for viruses. Not only that, businesses need to protect their field personnel from getting infected and also prevent the spread of the Coronavirus COVID-19.
With respect to cleaning, the CDC has come out with guidelines for cleaning and disinfecting facilities. The CDC guidelines address some key questions:
- How do you clean and disinfect a facility after persons suspected/confirmed to have COVID-19 have been in the facility? There are different procedures for facilities that do not house people overnight (school/daycare/office) and those that do house people overnight (hospitals/healthcare centers).
- How do you clean and disinfect a facility? Again, specific solutions (for example bleach or solutions with at least 70% alcohol concentration) need to be used, specific materials need to be used and specific procedures need to be followed.
- How do field personnel protect themselves from COVID-19 while at a facility? This includes the kind of protective equipment they need to use (such as masks, gloves, gowns) and specific rules for hand hygiene. In addition, compliance with OSHA guidelines for COVID-19 for your employees safety can help mitigate infection to employees while on the job.
In the light of these guidelines, how can facility management companies make sure that their field employees are actually following these procedures? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to measure compliance?
The good news is that there are things facilities management companies can do right now.
- Monitoring field employees while they are in the facilities doing their job is one way to ensure that procedures are being followed. They can make sure that employees are cleaning each and every facility on their list, spending a specific amount of time cleaning each facility and that the same facility is being cleaned again within a specific amount of time. This can be managed using QR codes that the field employee scans after the completion of each facility.
- Build custom Inspection forms to track work at sites and streamline quality assurance. Attach pictures, notes, barcode scans to easily create reports from the field. Information can be integrated with backend CRM systems and used for audits and SLA compliance.
- While at the jobsite, the safety of the employee is of utmost importance. By providing a way for field employees to alert management of concerns in real-time will help management respond quickly to any emergency situation that occurs in the facility.
- Reporting on field performance indicators (such as time spent at a facility) is critical. It helps businesses to see where their gaps are and put in place procedures to constantly improve their quality of service.
Facilities management companies can take advantage of these capabilities today in order to put in place a measurable system that will help them comply with these standards, guidelines and recommendations. It will inevitably improve the service they provide as well as create a safer environment for their employees.
About allGeo
allGeo helps SMBs and Enterprise businesses better manage mobile workforce and field operations with tools such as real-time location, GPS time and attendance, geofence visit logs, Lone worker safety, Mobile forms and more! All the tools can be highly customized to fit each use case. The platform features powerful rules engine and integrates with popular back-end CRM, HRMS, and Payroll systems to automate day-to-day operations.
allGeo serves customers from a wide range of industry including field service management, trade services, emergency responders, sales reps, transportation & logistics, oil & gas, home health care providers. These customers do report improvement in productivity and savings in payroll.
