Help Keep Your Workforce Safe with SmartSpace Contact Tracing

As businesses begin to bring employees back to the office—or build their return-to-work plans—they are dealing with multiple challenges imposed by the pandemic. Social distancing requirements must be met. Concern for employee health and safety is at an all-time high. Contact tracing capabilities are necessary. Businesses everywhere are looking to implement solutions for these new challenges as quickly as possible.

With respect to health and safety, one of the most pressing challenges revolves around contact tracing. In the event of a positive COVID-19 case at your office, you need to have a data-driven method to understand which spaces were used by an infected individual, as well as determine which employees were in close proximity to one another and must be informed in order to prevent the outbreak from spreading further.

SmartSpace (Poppulo) provides a solution for your contact tracing needs by providing detailed reports of where each employee reserved a desk or meeting room within a specific timeframe, as well as which employees were in the same space or in close contact during that time. You’ll also have control of which spaces are available to be booked by employees, both helping limit the possibility of an outbreak and enabling you to close areas where an infection may have occurred.

Contact tracing capabilities give you the confidence to act quickly and help keep your employees healthy as they return to the office.

By giving your employees the ability to book space in your office, plus providing granular detail about who books a specific desk or meeting room and how they book it, the Poppulo platform not only helps enable a safe transition back into the workplace, but also gives you built-in reporting to help you limit and contain the spread of the virus within your office.

With the contact tracing reporting feature, you can search the office by specific employees and dates to immediately see who needs to be contacted and informed if they were at risk of exposure within your office. The contact tracing report also serves as an audit trail of the employees who came in close contact with infected employees, further enabling your compliance with federal and local government recommendations and acting as a paper trail on how the infection may have spread within your office.

While contact tracing is a primary concern for businesses today, that functionality is just one use case that Poppulo delivers. We can help with both your return to the office efforts today and can continue to deliver value to your business as our world begins to return to normal. As your company adjusts to new office capacity and usage patterns, we can help you right-size to your real estate needs based on data-driven metrics around space utilization. In the longer-term, office space usage is likely to shift again, something that we can once again provide data that will help inform your real estate decisions.

Additional Benefits of Our Contact Tracing Capabilities:

• Employee Tracing: Search reports by employee to view the resources and coworkers they came in contact with and notify them in the event of an infection
• Block Bookable Resources: After an infection has been identified, quickly block off desks, spaces, or other resources that need to be deep cleaned to help prevent further spread
• IoT Sensor Integration: With IoT sensor technology, identify when employees sit at unreserved desks or enter blocked off spaces, allowing you to track compliance with social distancing measures

Quick and coordinated actions, including case investigation and contact tracing, may lower the need for business closures to prevent the spread of the disease.[2]