Every business is going to have their own 2020 stories. For some, it may be a story of survival; for others, it will be about the challenge of adapting to ever-changing rules and guidance. For us at Sign In App, it’s a bit both – reacting to shifting demands in the market while supporting our customers as they themselves are forced to adapt.
Rewind to the beginning of the year when a virus was starting to spread throughout China. Many of us in the UK business world didn’t believe it would significantly impact us. Fast forward a few months and we were faced with a global pandemic and a UK-wide lockdown. At this point, it was clear to us that the way people interacted with the workplace was going to change forever. We knew we needed to evolve our solution to support the changing workplace and safety measures required. Not only was it imperative that we did this, but we needed to do it fast.
As millions of organisations adapted to working remotely, our first priority was to help our customers who were in frontline services; our schools, care homes and food production companies. These organisations needed to continue operating in the safest way possible in such uncertain times. We noticed immediately that our core focus had swung from being visitor-centric to managing the safety of our staff.
The first demand we saw, even before going into lockdown, was the requirement for health screening, and so we introduced our health questionnaire feature at the end of February. Sign In App users could now present health questions to visitors and staff when they were signing in. If a negative answer was provided a notification could be sent, warning of a potential risk. Our customers could now manage the screening centrally and ensure safety notices and policies were getting completed.
Due to concerns around how the virus was transmitted, we had to evolve the way users interacted with Sign In App. ‘Contactless’ and ‘touch-free’ were new terminologies in our sector, dropped into our vocabulary overnight and our development team created a plan to support contactless sign in. Contactless sign in allows staff and visitors to sign in without needing to touch an iPad, helping to maintain social distancing. This was a huge enabler for our community, with some commenting that they couldn’t have opened their facilities without it.
We all went through a period where it felt like new guidance was being announced hour-by-hour and I’m sure you’ll agree it was pretty hard to keep up at times. We continued to direct our energy to where we felt we could help get people moving freely and safely.
One of these areas was our Sign In Point addition, a QR code that could be printed onto a poster and positioned in a public place, such as a pub or restaurant. We’re all used to this experience now, but we were pleased with how quickly we got our solution to market. It takes advantage of all of our enterprise data security, so data is automatically deleted and stored in our secure data centres. GDPR has definitely been another casualty of this pandemic, all these paper records and spreadsheets with personal data on are quite concerning.
Introducing staff back to the office has been a huge stress and expense for many. The safety of our people is a key factor when running our organisations and one that comes with inherent pressure. We’ve already added the ability to set occupancy limits and restrict access should a visitor or staff member fail your site’s safety requirements, and we plan to continue to introduce features to help our community adapt to new workplace requirements.
As well as changes to the workplace, approximately 75% of us have been working from makeshift offices in our homes. We’ve seen the total number of staff sign ins almost double since before lockdown as more businesses use Sign In App to monitor hours and wellbeing. To help manage a dispersed workforce we’ve added the ability to ask remote workers questions as they sign in, alerting you if they need support or asking them to agree to important policies.
There have been some amazing stories of people’s journeys through 2020. As we go into a hopeful 2021 it will be interesting to see how the legacy of this year plays out. At Sign In App we believe that the changes we’ve made this year have not changed our destination, just the route by which we get there.
If you’d like to find out more about how Sign In App can support your business with your staff and visitor management processes, visit www.signinapp.com, call the team on 0333 016 3551 or email us at sales@signinapp.com
Listen to Dan Harding, Nicola Harding and Chris Burton on the latest episode of The Podcast here.
