How CUs Can Use Innovative Technologies to Reopen Safely During COVID-19

The credit union industry faces a tremendous challenge in the era of COVID-19. Individual institutions must keep their workforce and members safe while maintaining normal operations. Deal-making must go on despite economic downturns, job losses and the difficulties of doing business without face-to-face interaction. Retail branch workers have tried to keep operations strong despite fears of COVID-19 transmission, threats from the growing number of online options and declining pedestrian traffic.

There have already been COVID-19 outbreaks in the offices of credit unions and other financial institutions. JPMorgan Chase experienced a well-publicized incident in September in which it had to send midtown employees in its sales and trading division home due to COVID-19 just days after it had sent these workers back to their offices. This latest setback came on the heels of the bank’s even more problematic COVID-19 outbreak in March at the onset of the pandemic.

A primary challenge for credit unions in regard to protecting their staff from COVID-19 is the heterogeneity of operations. They have retail areas that must allow visitor interactions for both retail clients and sophisticated partners. They have management and investment banking sections that put a premium on direct interactions, and where business traditionally thrives on face-to-face meetings. Each of these situations requires different levels of monitoring, education and the possibility of infection.

Creating a Culture of Safety

To minimize COVID-19 in their buildings, credit unions have been mandated to create an aura of safety for their employees, members and visitors. To achieve this, they must anticipate the potential of COVID-19 infections across all of their verticals. They need to adopt the most current cleaning regimens and implement the most current safety protocols. They need to be strong advocates of mask-wearing and social distancing. They need to eliminate areas for congregation such as kitchens. They need to clean restrooms multiple times a day. They need to ensure everyone gets a current flu vaccine now and COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available. Constant education and reminders need to be prominently displayed so all workers demonstrate optimal vigilance toward infection control. Building a strong culture of safety will strengthen personal responsibility and minimize workplace-related transmissions.

Financial institutions need to minimize the likelihood of COVID-19 infiltrating their workplace using all available methods. Federal and state regulations uniformly require symptom monitoring, education and screening protocols. However, many companies choose to follow only the absolute minimum on these requirements. They use paper or Google Docs for symptom monitoring and downplay personal attestation. Other cursory symptom monitoring products are in the public sphere and available, but many of these products only serve as “box-checking” devices. They offer no element of actual conveyance as to the importance of the process.

Symptomatic individuals or persons who have ill domestic contacts need to understand that taking their symptoms into the workplace is irresponsible and potentially disastrous to their co-workers and institution. Employers need to instill the message that flu symptoms are not tolerable in the workplace. These issues are relevant even outside of COVID-19 as individuals can never know if they are potentially infecting someone who has a vulnerable family member.

The strongest methodology to use to meet these requirements is an integrated software platform with an electronic symptom monitor that formalizes an in-depth understanding of COVID-19 symptoms. This solution necessitates formal employee attestation as to being symptom-free of any flu or COVID-19-like characteristics. This type of method gives the employees, and also all visitors and members, insight into understanding the seriousness of COVID-19 and the importance of self-reporting honesty. Additionally, completion of a full questionnaire is required to provide an exhaustive encapsulation of symptoms that could represent less typical but still dangerous signs of COVID-19. For any symptom monitor to be effective, adoption in real-time by all employees is mandatory. Companies that settle for less than 100% survey adoption are doomed to be plagued by potential outbreaks.

Establishing Access Control to the Workplace

Strict control of all individuals who enter the workplace is essential in the COVID-19 era. The days when offices can had individuals enter and exit workplaces without documentation or scrutiny are over. Security has to be strong and ensure that only necessary individuals are allowed into the workplace. All individuals additionally need to be heavily screened for the presence of COVID-19 symptoms. Special screening needs to be performed to meet other local quarantine requirements and address regulatory concerns.

A strong electronic product can perform many of these functions while capturing the presence of all individuals who go into the workplace and their presumed contacts or whereabouts. Such a software product can be used for members, visitors and onsite employees. Notably, these products can also be used in and out of the workplace on a variety of devices including smartphones, kiosks and iPads. These products can also assist in creating strategies to stagger employees and minimize overlap.

Containing Known or Suspected Infections

The most important element of success for credit unions and other businesses in the COVID-19 era is their ability to contain COVID-19 infections in their workplaces. Not having a COVID-19 containment plan prior to reopening is inexcusable. And not having a strong plan in place for these cases up front will cause unnecessary disease propagation, misinformation, employee mistrust, litigation and potentially employee panic. From an economic standpoint, poor planning for COVID-19 is detrimental to the business, the potentially infected individual and their contacts.

Not every business necessarily needs to close with a single suspected infection. Statistically, larger settings are the most likely areas to have one or more COVID-19 infections, and these areas need to be the most prepared. Success in this area also requires taking action prior to confirmation of a COVID-19 infection. Otherwise, infections will have already spread exponentially.

Employers should understand how COVID-19 cases could potentially spread in their workplace. Likely spread is directly related to the physical proximity and the duration of interpersonal contact between individuals in the workplace. Teams working close together are more likely to spread COVID-19 to each other than to individuals with no discernible work-related contact.

Understanding containment strategies is vital. To borrow an analogy from a first responder or disaster lexicon, principles of both horizontal and vertical transmission must be understood. Horizontal transmission occurs between normally interacting cohorts such as workers on the same team or those with clustered seating proximities. Vertical transmission occurs between individuals who interact in completely separately cohorts and all but assures the spread within the company. Businesses need to contain COVID-19 transmissions horizontally before they spread vertically to all other facets of the organization and its clients.

New technologies use these principles to contain COVID-19.  The same electronic symptom monitor platforms can be equipped with the capacity for automating the containment within organizations. Techniques such as classifying employees by tag, associations or work contacts will simplify the decisions to be made around which individuals should quarantine if someone has a suspected or proven COVID-19 infection. Organizations will learn that the best initial strategy is to quarantine more individuals than necessary when they face potential outbreaks. Strategic utilization of a software-based electronic employee management platform can facilitate this decision-making expediently and seamlessly.

The COVID-19 era is here to stay for now. Credit unions can no longer compete by keeping all of their employees at home during the crucial hours of workplace productivity. Workplace infection prevention can best be facilitated by electronic solutions that monitor and manage employees with novel solutions.

Soumi Eachempati, MD, FACS, FCCM is the CEO of Chelsea Health Solutions and a retired professor of surgery and public health based in New York, N.Y.