People and productivity: Responding to the impacts within today’s crisis

30/04/20

PwC provides tools to help improve employee confidence, understand productivity and reduce risk exposure

Every successful business is dependent on the health, welfare and productivity of its workforce. When major business disruptions occur, such as those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing an exceptionally strong connection between employees and employers, large and small, is paramount to maintaining employee confidence and productivity. According to Emily Stapf, Principal in PwC’s Cybersecurity and Privacy practice, “Our future workforce will be more remote than at any time in the past for many businesses, which creates new responsibilities for enterprise workforce managers and for the technologies that support productivity. For example, it becomes increasingly critical to provide secure means to connect quickly and consistently with distributed workers and identify and resolve productivity hurdles at scale.”

In addition, PwC’s Connected Solutions Team Partner David Sapin says, “the other challenge many companies are facing today — and many more will face in the coming months — is how to mitigate the risk to their workforce from COVID-19 exposure in the workplace. New technologies will need to be embraced in order to notify employees in a timely and precise manner of potential exposure to another infected employee. This is going to be a critical element in order to build confidence in employees that it is ok to come back to the workplace, whether it is an office, factory or campus.”    

To help meet these challenges, PwC on April 1 launched Check-In, a product platform with two solutions focused on worker productivity and safety. The first is Status Connect, which helps employers understand where employees are working—remotely, from an office, in another location—in seconds not days. Status Connect also identifies impact factors, such as technology, mobility and business supplies, for example, that are preventing the workforce from being able to work effectively. The second solution, Automatic Contact Tracing is a mobile app that can collect proximity information anonymously and allows managers to effectively and precisely notify employees when they may have come into contact with an at-risk colleague.

According to Technology Business Research (TBR), “these paired solutions demonstrate a concrete and immediate response — from idea to launch in five weeks — to some of the issues facing global companies during the pandemic and should set PwC’s clients up to better understand and manage remote working productivity in a post-COVID-19 world.”

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