As of mid-April 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread to over 210 countries around the world, infecting millions of people and taking the lives of more than a hundred thousand. The impact of the crisis left the global economy suffering as more and more businesses dropped drastically.

Meanwhile, several companies strive to survive amid the pandemic by turning to remote work. This allowed them to continue their businesses even with the constraints of the community quarantine. Even so, companies are still advised by the government to monitor their employees’ health status daily. This means essential information such as body temperature, travel history, and presence of COVID-19 symptoms should be reported daily.

While remote working may be ideal in trying to slow down the spread of the virus, it also poses a challenge for employers to keep track of the health and safety of their employees. Luckily, automation offers a less burdensome solution in prioritizing employee welfare throughout the crisis.

 

Automated Health Screening

Checking the health status of each employee can be a tedious task especially for large-scale companies. With the help of automation, the Human Resources team tasked with such tasks can customize a questionnaire they can send to their employees according to the needs of their company. These questionnaires contain all the necessary information needed for them to generate daily employee health reports.

Once a questionnaire has been set by the HR team, bots can send them across all staff for them to fill out using different communication platforms such as Slack, Skype, or whatever tool the company integrates. This allows for the company’s employees to have easier access to the tracker. It also lessens the effort they need to exert for the process as opposed to having them check their emails for the health tracker daily.

Through automation, answers to the health questionnaire can be captured in a systematic way. It can also alert the employer if there are symptoms present in some members of the team such as high body temperature, making it easier for companies to manage and remediate the situation.

 

Increasing employee compliance

Delays in submitting the health surveys may result in compliance lapses. Fortunately, HR teams can also program bots to send out reminders to employees who fail to answer the questionnaire on the first reminder. It can also keep track who were able to comply and who weren’t. To address this, the HR team can set an hourly reminder to make sure that all employees are able to update the company with their health status. This effectively lessens that burden from the team to go through each employee one by one and frees up their time to work on other more important tasks.

 

Reviewing employee travel history

Included in the necessary check companies have to comply with is a report of their employees’ travel history. Automation can help collect and organize such information accordingly. It can also obtain current COVID-19 data from public health institutions such as the number of confirmed cases and areas of infection. Bots can be programmed to cross-check between these two sets of data to see if there are any employees who have traveled to or are residing in infected sites and are showing symptoms of the virus.

 

Data organization and report generation

As part of the end-to-end process, health screening bots can organize the data it receives and summarizes them into reports. They can generate visual presentations of these data such as charts and graphs in just a short amount of time that employees and employers can effortlessly understand and interpret.

Additionally, these bots can also file each report accordingly for easier access. The reports can also be curated and summarized on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis depending on the company’s needs. That way, HR employees can review results when they need to and identify if there are any anomalies.

Technology like Robotics Process Automation (RPA) has delivered essential benefits and solutions in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, integrating RPA solutions to employee status check amid the ongoing crisis helps simplify proactive health measures for different businesses. At the same time, it gives them more opportunities to focus on more important matters such as managing employee welfare and business continuity. Bots can help drive innovation and encourage compliance within the members of the team in a more efficient and user-friendly manner.

 

Get your free Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Software: Download here