How Visitor Management Software Can Help Your Business Maintain a Safe Work Environment

Are you looking for additional safety precautions that you can take to guard the health of your employees during the COVID-19 pandemic? Visitor management software is proving to be far more valuable than just a way to greet visitors to your workplace. 

With ALICE, it can also be a virtual frontline worker helping you protect your staff’s health. Let’s examine various ways to use ALICE Receptionist as a buffer between potentially infectious visitors and your employees.

Pre-Screening 

You can save time screening visitors if you pre-screen them. A self-service virtual receptionist like ALICE can present safety videos as well as ask visitors to sign documents showing that they understand and agree to comply with your office COVID policies. 

Visitors who refuse to conduct themselves according to your health policies are stopped at the reception desk. Just this one simple procedure could prevent infection from spreading throughout your facility. 

Temperature Screening 

One of the primary ways to screen for evidence of a COVID-19 infection is by measuring body temperature. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers a temperature of 100.4 Fahrenheit or higher to be a possible indication of infection. 

In some workplaces, staffers are assigned to take the temperature of visitors using no-contact tools such as infrared thermometers. Of course, the workers still have to be within close proximity to take the temperature.  

That distance is less than six feet, the recommended gap we should leave between ourselves and others during the pandemic. In other words, employees tasked with taking the temperatures of visitors are putting themselves at risk. 

However, facilities that use visitor management solutions such as ALICE keep their employees safe. No staff member is needed to take temperatures. ALICE performs full-service visitor screening and alerts both the visitor and the administration if the guest is running a fever. 

Contact Tracing 

A visitor to your location might show no signs of COVID-19 infection at the time of his visit despite carrying the virus. How is this possible?

Going Undetected

Some infected persons are asymptomatic based upon the criteria currently used to test for the virus. For example, the generally recognized temperature for a normally functioning adult is 98.6. Unfortunately, this standard was established in the mid-1800s. 

Thermometers were far less accurate at that time. Also, as the average level of human health has increased, body temperatures have tended to decrease. Authorities today realize that a healthy adult could have a temperature as low as 97.  

That means that someone who typically has a temperature of 97 could arrive at your location running a fever of 99. But that’s still lower than the 100.4 mark that triggers warnings of COVID-19. So, the infected person could pass a temperature screening and be admitted into your business. 

What happens days later when the visitor finds out that he has COVID-19? That’s when contact tracing becomes essential.

How Contact Tracing Works

Contact tracing is the process of creating a list of people likely to have encountered the sick person and informing them that they may have been exposed to the virus. How does ALICE help with contact tracing? 

ALICE captures an image of the visitor as well as a name for accurate identification. ALICE also logs the visitor’s phone number and email address. Additionally, it records the name of the visitor’s host. This information is invaluable. It allows you to determine which of your employees came into contact with the visitor. 

Armed with this information, you can stop the spread of the virus before it proliferates throughout your facility. Your at-risk employees can quarantine at home and closely monitor their health. Your other employees will have a notable degree of relief knowing that there is evidence that they were nowhere near the infected person or those with whom the infected person associated.  

The CDC definition of close contact is one of your employers being less than six feet from an infected person for at least 15 minutes. This definition would easily fit client meetings and job interviews. And yes, it’s still considered a close contact even when the people in question are wearing masks. 

Persons infected with COVID-19 may show no signs of the illness despite contracting the virus up to two days earlier. Humans in the work sector can amass a large number of close contacts within two days. Contact tracing using ALICE is not only efficient but quite simply might save lives.  

Masks 

Before vaccines, masks were our primary defense against contracting or spreading COVID-19 other than social distancing. Now that vaccines are available, some visitors may have greater reluctance to wearing masks. 

But the medical community still considers masks an essential tool in containing the spread of the virus. Even vaccinated people are encouraged by many health experts to continue wearing masks until the infection rate is much lower.  

ALICE allows you to verify that your visitors comply with company policy or state mandates when it comes to masks. Sometimes visitors want to voice their strong opinions against masks. You can often prevent your employees from encountering the brunt of someone’s anger if you use ALICE as your initial liaison with the public.

No-Touch Console 

In the early days of COVID-19, experts thought the virus might infect people when they touched contaminated surfaces. Yes, it’s possible to contract the illness in that manner, but fortunately, we’ve learned that the risk isn’t significant under average conditions. 

The risk is thought to increase based upon the number of respiratory droplets deposited on a surface and then transferred to another person. Simply breathing upon a surface by an infected person carries a much lower risk than coughing or sneezing upon that same surface. 

 However, when it comes to your employees’ health, you don’t want to take chances. That’s why a self-service kiosk like ALICE offers safe ways for visitors to input information without touching items that others have handled.  

For example, you can add a disposable stylus dispenser at the reception desk that visitors can use to make selections on ALICE’s console. You can also allow employees from a safe distance to have live video communications with visitors at reception. To do so, you set ALICE to Operator Mode to automatically alert the appropriate employee when someone approaches the desk. 

Make the Move to Visitor Management Software 

Why risk the health of your employees by asking them to staff a reception desk? Let visitor management software like ALICE do it.  

ALICE Receptionist can pre-screen and screen all visitors, preventing access to those who either show signs of an infection or refuse to comply with company health policies. It will even keep a record of those who visited your facility and later began to exhibit COVID symptoms. 

Protect the health of your employees. Contact us today to learn how easy it is to begin using ALICE Receptionist.