Building the new “normal” in offices and industry: Minimizing risk while keeping employees engaged

Businesses around the globe are envisioning and creating a “new normal” requiring physical, technological, and behavioral changes to ensure a safe and productive work environment.
 

Complementing personal behaviors such as social distancing, hygiene and masking, changes in structural environments will need to be developed. Some of the challenges to resumption of productivity are:

• How do you ensure effective sanitization?
  
• How do you guide people through a building in the safest way?
• How do you optimize your technologies to make space and staff more efficient?
   

The Interact portfolio of tailor-made software applications can help businesses understand how space is being used and reallocate space where and when needed.

Health and well-being are paramount to productivity, and the effective cleaning and sanitization of communal areas and meeting rooms requires analysis of space utilization to identify areas that have been occupied. Interact software can map the activity of employees to ensure sanitization occurs quickly upon conclusion of a meeting or gathering.

Utilizing the Interact Workspace (mobile) App, employees can adjust the office lights via their personal device to avoiding contact with high-touch areas and will enable users to reserve desks, simplifying the search for a workspace and ensure accepted limitations per area.
 

Additionally, Interact Workspace App provides digital maps with real time occupancy data and user’s position that can navigate employees to the right part of the building, avoiding the areas where large number of people concentrate. This is a tremendous advantage in wayfinding to quickly locate and navigate to a safe meeting point. It also allows for guiding traffic in the event of an emergency.
 

Space planning and social distancing can be monitored with Interact Space Management applications which monitor in real time, people density and space utilization to ensure limits are never exceeded.

Incorporating sanitizing and safe cleaning via use of UV-C lighting can ensure your office spaces are undergoing consistent removal of bacteria in the air. Interact Space Management application will monitor in real time space utilization and integrate with other safety controls to ensure UV-C session are deployed and luminaires turn on/off based on schedules, it will further provide remote monitoring of the UV-C lamp lifetime and predict maintenance based on burning hours.
 

In research Signify conducted in conjunction with the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory at Boston University, the use of Signify UV-C light sources resulted in a 99% reduction of the SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) virus in six seconds.
 

Beginning in September, Signify will launch 12 families of UV-C luminaires this year targeted at the disinfection of surfaces in offices, schools and restrooms.
 

The evolving science behind the behavior of this and future health challenges will require adaptation of current and creation of new methods and technologies to meet the goal of a full return to “new normalcy”. Signify and Interact Software are dedicated to meet those challenges now and in the future.