ServiceNow Safe Workplace suite: Your plan of action for a safe return to work

After a rather tumultuous and disruptive 2020, many organizations are gearing up to resume  business operations from the workplace. While conversations about a return to the workplace started in 2020, the workforce remains skeptical and is seeking assurances that any such return will be safe.

According to  ServiceNow’s Work Survey research (conducted by Wakefield Research), 3 in 4 Singapore employees (72%) believe their company will prioritise business continuity over workplace safety. These safety concerns run well ahead of the global average (60%), only exceeded by workers in New Zealand and India. More surprisingly, Singapore’s decision makers agree, with close to 3 in 5 executives (57%) sharing this sentiment. Addressing these concerns, the ServiceNow Safe Workplace App Suite has been downloaded by over 900 organisations worldwide and has already been deployed by many of them to return employees to offices safely.

Powered by the Now Platform, the ServiceNow Safe Workplace Apps, provides a suite of applications designed to help companies manage the essential steps for returning employees to the workplace. From apps to gauge employee readiness to return to the workplace through surveys and health safety screening, to enabling employers better plan workplace readiness for a safe return, allowing them to automate and manage capacities and seating arrangements, track workplace exposure, integrate safe transport access to eliminate exposure to public transportation and all the things that they will have to look out for to create a safe work environment, the Safe Workplace Suite is a one stop shop for employers and employees awaiting a return to office.

Additional Apps and upgrades are regularly added to the Safe Workplace Apps suite with everything feeding into one master dashboard that enables executives to review the data holistically and assist in decision making.

Returning to work is a daunting task. And there are certainly multiple levels to check if employees are to return to the workplace, and the responsibility of ensuring not just a safe return, but a seamless experience through the shift, rests on employers.

Recognizing this need, the Safe Workplace suite of applications is crafted to gauge readiness and track exposure as workplaces call upon their workforce to return to work, addressing the various aspects of a comprehensive return to workplace strategy and supporting employers with a plan of action.

Reopening of offices is well underway in some parts of the globe. And while some organizations have begun having a reasonable segment of the workforce back in office, some remain in the surveying phase, assessing readiness. Commenting on the complexities brought on by the variables across multiple workplaces, Robert Teed, Vice President, Workplace Services, ServiceNow, said, “There really is no single solution to fit every organization. However, I would say it should always be people first, and places second, and that order is important. And at the core of every solution really should be the care of the people that are being served by that organization.”

Teed highlighted that the digital workflows crafted by ServiceNow have been able to cut across the emerging complexities of geographies, departments and systems, making it easy and taking all the complexity out. “The more variables there are, the more complexity that gets introduced in bringing people back to the workplace. Solving these complexities really means solving workflow problems that exist across the enterprise. The Safe Workplace Suite offers very different solutions based on the different phases, in that diversity of circumstances that may exist as people are trying to return to the workplace. We will continue to innovate and iterate these apps to support the dynamic situation that’s out there and the fluidity that’s out there during this pandemic.”

Sharing how the Safe Workplace Apps suite is leveraging technology to enable work in the new normal, Dave Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow noted, “It really doesn’t matter where you are in your journey, from the most old school applications to modern cloud infrastructure, the Now Platform helps fully modernize experiences and improve productivity for IT, for employees, for customers, and it’s for that reason that it’s being called the platform of platforms, because it really does start to bring everything together.”

The crux of the Safe Workplace Suite as Wright aptly captures is to look beyond survival. “The opportunity before us today isn’t just to survive, but it’s to thrive, and in the process, make the world of work work better for every single person.”