Risk management is a strategic part of what businesses do in to prevent and mitigate incidents that may impact their business negatively. While risk managers were focused on the different business risks that presented a threat to the well-being of their business including health-related risks, they had limited insight into how the pandemic would affect businesses and lead to the lockdown that followed.
With the pandemic ongoing, risk managers have added an extra layer of risk management initiatives that are designed to help them protect their businesses. Some of those activities may include location assessment for return to work, preparation of work facilities to accommodate measures designed to reduce the spread of the virus, choosing remote working options, and also tracking of vaccination rates among employees.
Steps to Reducing Business Risk with Vaccination Tracking
Businesses considering vaccination tracking should follow these steps.
1. Create a Vaccination Policy
Create a vaccination policy that outlines how your organization wants to use vaccine tracking to reduce business risks. The policy may be a vaccine mandate or a testing requirement that enables the company to know if and when an employee is likely to be a threat to the organization's health and safety. The policy will be implemented by the human resource department in line with what is allowable by the health authorities and government. A policy will make it clear where the company stands and will guide those tasked with implementing the policies on what is allowable and what is not.
2. Gather Data
Data is the most important thing you need when making decisions especially as it concerns risk management in an organization. As a business, you should gather data in compliance with the vaccination policy you put in place. This data may be the number of staff who have been fully vaccinated, the ones who have not been fully vaccinated, and the ones who are not vaccinated.
You may also want to extract data about their residences, for example, if you have staff that lives in pandemic hotspots you may want to supply them with information about the pandemic as it pertains to their location. Some of the ways you can gather data for your vaccination tracking may include, distributing digital surveys about the pandemic, health screening surveys, and also collation of already available data from the Center for disease control
While gathering data is great, gathering data in a way that is efficient and promotes good data quality is also important, this is where you need software to help you.
3. Use a Risk Management Platform
Using a Risk Management System to gather your data will ensure that you have good quality data to work with. It also helps to protect the privacy of the employees as they can securely use the system to upload their information without it passing through various employees. For example, risk management software can be used to do the following
- Distribute health screening surveys
- Collect data on vaccination and health status of employees
- Track Testing amongst employees
- Analyze pandemic data and make risk management decisions
- Convey information about any change in policy as regards the pandemic.
- Prompt and remind employees about vaccination status
- Track vaccination rates amongst employees
When you use software like the RMIS, you can overlay information gathered within the organization with other information sources pulled from outside the organization to make decisions that will help you better reduce your business risks
4. Track and Visualize Vaccination data
Using the RMIS to gather your data means that you can easily track vaccination rates within your organization, the data gathered also enables you to isolate hotspots within your organization that could result in potential health hazards. For example, if you have a high concentration of people in a department that are unvaccinated, you may want to look at how to mitigate against sudden infections that will take down a department. You may also choose to let the whole department work from home if the risk is high and you cannot enforce a vaccine mandate.
Visualizing information gathered from your vaccination tracking will help you better plan your business operations to avoid the breakdown of a business unit especially if it's a crucial department that impacts your organizational goals.
Benefits of Vaccination Tracking
Vaccination tracking can help hasten the move to a post-pandemic era, it can also help a business keep its employees safe because it is aware of their vaccination status. Finally, it can help businesses reduce their business risks because they can foresee what is likely to happen with the data they have. Using the right tools will enable businesses to deliver excellent risk management initiatives.
Talk to an expert at Ventiv Technology today to learn more.
