Accelerated Health and Safety: Back to Work, School & Universities

Getting back from a pandemic is not an easy task. The new normal will definitely be a challenge to adapt to when it comes to resuming regular school, universities, and office life. All the health and safety measures will need to be incorporated and that might just make the management a bit more hectic.

But is there a way to smoothly incorporate the safety measures and new normal at the time when educational institutes and corporate sectors re-open? Read on to find out!

What Makes Accely’s Environment, Health & Safety Management A Necessity?

Sitting in the comfort of your home, watching your family members attend offices, universities and schools online has been quite an experience.

The challenges that came along with the pandemic calls for a strong EHS (Environment, Health, and Safety) management setup. After nearly four months, offices, universities, and schools are opening up, but challenges refuse to go away. These challenges need special attention and a comprehensive solution, much like the SAP EHS tool.

The numbers story

• According to UNESCO, with nearly 143 countries closing down due to pandemic, more than 60% of the student population have lost their connection with education.
• According to a published report on ILO official site, the loss of work hours has increased from 6.7% to 10.5%. This means the full-time job depletion has risen from 195 million to 305 million.

These are alarming numbers calling for the immediate reopening of workplaces, universities, and schools. Being the leading technology solution, Accely and SAP have taken a joint initiative to play in these reopenings while keeping safety measures in mind.

We are at the nascent stage of reopening globally. So most of the challenges will show up with time. But let us discuss some of the challenges that are right in front of us.

Reopening Challenges Faced By Office, Schools & Universities

Faced By Schools & Universities

Since some of the schools and universities have already reopened, and some are on the verge of reopening, rising above the challenges is a steep climb.

A lot of educational institutes (including schools and colleges) have the resources to plug in innovative solutions for dealing with COVID-19 challenges. Then there are schools in emerging economies that operate on a limited budget. So, no true-one-solution that fits all sections of the economy.

As the universities reopen, constant monitoring of student activities to keep up with social distancing norms is quite daunting. The reason being most of the activities are group-based. Further, keeping track of students’ immediate contact outside the classroom is another challenge.

One more major challenge that universities (specifically) might face is the sheer number of students. A lot of universities have a huge number of students belonging to different sections. This also makes it hard to maintain safety measures manually.

Faced By Offices And Workplace

Offices and workplace opening after months of lockdown have a fair share of challenges ahead. The nature of challenges ranges from flat out operational to psychological.

On the operational side of things, challenges, like employee movement tracking, health questionnaires relevancy, and social distancing at strategic points, require the deployment of a reliable safety mechanism.

An excellent place to start would be implementing an employee health tracking setup. There is no end to the list of challenges, as many more will come up. Our technological recourse is the technological innovation for dealing with the blow of pandemic. Let’s see how SAP EHS solutions can be handy a proposition for health and safety management.

How can Accely’s solutions for health & safety management help?

We have covered various challenges that, in a way, can hinder the reopening of schools, universities and offices. Yes, the nature and extent of challenges differ in both cases.

Effective Accelerated EHS solutions, powered by centralized health and management set up for offices, is an effective way to bring back some sort of normalcy to the situation. The SAP solutions also make way for Accely’s EHS integration, thus bolstering the safety setup for both schools, universities and offices.

Need For A Centralized Safety Set Up

• Subjective nature of HSE reporting due to lack of quantifiable representation of KPIs and target data

• Inconsistent process of preparing reports amongst contractors

• Lack of a unified method to assess, and make sense of data renders safety steps futile

Essential Elements Of Health Tracking

• Getting employees to complete the health questionnaire as they return
• Tracking the medical status of the patient by updating medical records
• Reporting on the data collected about the health and work status of the employee

Why is the Accelerated EHS management solution necessary?

• Health & Safety Management

With Accelerated EHS solutions, assess the risks associated with employees and vendors using various data analysis methods. Also, it becomes easier to incorporate an appropriate system to monitor the health of the employee with such solutions. This also includes tracking the exposure of workers and clients to volatile hazards.

• Compliance Management

Compliance management is an integral part of EHS solutions, where the legal changes are monitored continuously. Any modification is innately merged into the natural operations. Also, creating a centralized legal registry setup for bringing in external expertise to sync the operational process with legal changes, is a part of the safety management solutions.

• Environment Management

Gathering and analyzing data records for keeping the emissions in check with the standards set by the governing bodies. Finding the cause for any discrepancy in emission rates and working on the ways to align with the standards set by the concerned authority.

• Incident Management

The very basic element of incident management is to restore normalcy in the operational process as quickly as possible. Being on top of the incident management requires an industry-standard process to track the cause and follow up with immediate remedial actions.

• Promotes Workers’ Safety

Nothing comes close to worker safety in the priority list of EHS management solutions. It involves analyzing information regarding the safer work environment and processing and implementing the same. Pooling in risk management and asset management together adds a new dimension to safety setup.

Key Benefits Of Implementing Accelerated EHS Management Solution

• Manages EHS More Efficiently

Improve the effectiveness of EHS management systems by monitoring daily business operations through the lens of risk management. Ideally, when the business processes are managed with greater interoperability, the efficiency of EHS comes to the fore.

• Makes Operations Safer In Crunch Situations

Bringing in workers to the same page about operational safety requires identification of hazards and dealing with it in a collaborative form. An ideal communication among the workers about the hazards can arrest operational disruption beforehand.

• Protects Continuity Of Operations

Working on crucial safety plot points from an operational to an individual worker’s standpoint helps in avoiding downtime. This, in turn, helps to shield the production process and makes way for optimal utilization of resources.

Finishing Up

SAP EHS solutions can make the process of reopening schools, universities and offices a lot more humane. The EHS solutions cover up every aspect of the concern. Be it the worker’s safety or compliance with the standard protocols; it assists in all of the management of essential components that ignite hope for more than a partial retrieval of normalcy in the working and the educational space.