The impact of COVID-19 has been felt by most businesses around the world. For some, it has caused just mild disruption – a short-term blip to operations that hopefully won’t cause lasting damage. For others, the pandemic will have been catastrophic, with halts to production and the resulting loss of revenue ultimately proving too costly for firms to survive.
At the sharp end of COVID-19’s effect on business have been companies with large active worker environments. Firms in areas like manufacturing or pharmaceuticals, where teams of employees are required to work closely together, often in enclosed workspaces like factories or laboratories, have struggled with challenges like introducing social distancing measures, or adapting to remote working.
Keep your distance
With the Connected Worker Platform from Nymi, companies gain a connected worker service that not only tackles the joint challenges of compliance, data integrity, security and strong authentication, but which also enables health and safety measures to be implemented, keeping active worker environments operational amidst a pandemic.
For companies looking to introduce user orientated security solutions that are health and safety capable, and can cater for secure social distancing measures that really work amongst many uses, the Nymi Band™️ is a reliable solution that’s easy to implement.
Once the Nymi Band’s social distancing use case is activated, it will determine the proximity of the wearer to other Nymi Band wearers, before sending alerts to each relevant user whenever a social distancing measure isn’t followed. Each ‘event’ is logged and can only be reviewed by authorised administrators.
The personalised feedback the Nymi Band provides encourages users to form their own smart distancing habits and make the effort to stick to them. “It conditions workers for healthy behaviour,” Chris Sullivan, Nymi’s CEO, says of the technology.
By empowering users to make their own choices in this way, companies are more likely to have their workplace rules around social distancing adhered to than if they simply told employees how to behave.
Contact tracing
The Connected Worker Platform also gives companies the means to act quickly if a situation requires contact tracing, like when a positive case of COVID-19 is identified in the workplace.
With the Connected Worker Platform, customers can access a contact tracing dashboard showing the ‘contact logs’ for each Nymi Band user on the system. Whenever a user is in range of one of Nymi’s Bluetooth-enabled endpoints, their contact logs get uploaded to a central server. Administrators can then review the logs and find out exactly which other individuals that user has had contact with, where, when and for how long.
With this information, administrators can quickly determine who else in the organisation may be at risk from COVID-19 and needs to go into quarantine, or self-isolation. High-risk areas within a workplace can also be quickly identified, locked down and secured.
Not only is this safer than existing manual contact tracing systems, it’s also more efficient for the business. “At the moment, if one worker in a production facility shows COVID-19 symptoms, most companies will just send their entire workforce from that facility home, and production will stop for ten days,” explains Danielle Harrison, Nymi’s Quality Systems Lead.
“Because the contacts of that one worker with COVID-19 symptoms can’t be reliably identified, companies have to assume that everyone could be a risk and dismiss the whole department. This is obviously really disruptive to production and the flow of operations.
“With the Nymi Band, we know exactly who users came into contact with, and exactly for how long. Companies no longer have to send entire teams of workers home because of one case of suspected COVID-19. It means production can continue as normal.”
Scalable solutions
For businesses with active worker environments, features like social distancing and the contact tracing make the Nymi Band one of the most effective solutions available for combating the risks of COVID-19.
But it’s the scalability of the platform that provides real value. From passwordless and contactless systems access, to privileged access management, transaction authorisation, workforce communication, geofencing and even payments, the Connected Worker Platform is built to solve so many more problems for companies than the immediate ones caused by the pandemic.
Whether by removing barriers to authentication, improving data integrity and systems security, increasing compliance levels or ensuring employee health and safety, “it’s what you do with the band that creates value for the worker and the business,” adds Sullivan.
