According to Gartner, “Social distancing technology tracks the distance between individuals and (in some cases) tracks their locations to create a safer post pandemic working environment. Systems include real-time proximity warnings, logging proximity events, tracking the use of spaces, managing workplace capacity and providing analytics about staff behavior.”

Gartner’s Market Guide for Social Distancing Technology further outlines, “Social distancing is not limited to monitoring short-range proximity, such as the two-feet/two-meter limit. It’s concerned with a wide range of issues related to the location and spatial relationships of staff. For example, managing the number of people in a zone or space is also a dimension of social distancing and, from a contact-tracing perspective, it may be as important to know someone was not in a space as knowing that he or she was.”

The Everbridge Return to Work solution speeds up contact tracing efforts by providing an automated approach to tracking an individual’s exposure to the virus at work, drawing upon 225 pre-existing, out-of-the-box integrations with such systems as calendaring applications, corporate travel itineraries, building access control, and visitor management. Everbridge enables over 100 communication modalities, including its mobile app, to communicate with and provide real-time feedback from employees, such as wellness checks, which can be used to determine who are candidates to return to work. Overall, Everbridge digitizes and automates the end-to-end return-to-work process while dramatically improving the response time to prevent unnecessary exposure to the virus when days and even hours matter.

Health organizations such as The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend that return to work best practices should require employers to monitor employee health through testing, wellness checks and self-reporting (where employees identify how they are feeling through an app, such as the Everbridge mobile app, on an ‘opt-in’ basis). Contact tracing seeks to identify who else has been exposed to the virus and to coordinate isolation and communications.

“The world’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to be complex, staggered and unpredictable,” said Ajay Nigam, Chief Product Officer at Everbridge. “In the meantime, technology, tools and data are available now to protect people as they return to work, get operations going, and to help governments keep their citizens safe in a better and more efficient manner while protecting privacy. The better handle an organization has on all this complexity, the sooner businesses can return employees to work while governments safely reopen public spaces.”