If I would have heard the terms, “Return to Office” or “Return to Work” 12 months ago, I would have assumed you were talking about new parents returning after parental leave or perhaps an employee returning after a battle with health issues. I would never have imagined it would grow to mean “a step toward returning to normal.”
The COVID-19 pandemic shows that technology is more important than ever when it comes to solving organizational challenges. When Silverline developed the RSVP accelerator for CalendarAnything in 2019, the most common use case was allowing prospects or clients the ability to self-schedule with resources on their team. Now, we’re using CalendarAnything to help organizations safely return to office — including our own New York and Omaha offices.
Crafting the plan
The People team at Silverline developed a plan to safely return to office in July 2020. They knew they had a mountain of work ahead of them. Not only did they think about how to return to the office safely, but also provide all of the necessary tools to report contact tracing and any documentation required by local and state agencies.
The team sent out a survey to gauge interest in returning to office — unsurprisingly, our employees were eager to get back into a more normal rhythm.
The team needed the ability for individuals to sign up to be in office on the dates they wanted and track attendance of those employees. To comply with state and local guidelines, they also needed a way to limit the number of people in office, ensure that a questionnaire was completed within 24 hours of entering the office, and generate a daily report for the building manager to reference.
RSVP to the Rescue!
At Silverline, we believe in the power of Salesforce. So much so that we immediately turned to our Salesforce-run tools and accelerators to accomplish this daunting task. We would leverage the Salesforce Platform along with our CalendarAnything AppExchange product and Accelerator for CalendarAnything, RSVP.
CalendarAnything is a visualization tool of Salesforce data and the RSVP Accelerator allows for self scheduling via a calendar that is presented with current availability. The RSVP Accelerator for CalendarAnything allows the People Team at Silverline to limit the number of reservations for any single day. Once that day reached max office capacity, the signup slot for that day will no longer be available.
As CalendarAnything visualizes Salesforce data, it creates an attendee record with each reservation. This automatically sends a link to the contact tracing questionnaire to employees 24 hours before arriving at the office, as well as tracking attendance. The attendee can edit their own attendee record within Salesforce, should that employee no longer want or be able to come into the office that week. The creation of attendance records by CalendarAnything/RSVP enables the People Team to easily contact trace via reports and dashboards should anyone test positive for COVID-19.
Leveraging the Salesforce platform for our return to office initiative was imperative to the process as we wanted to ensure we had proper documentation of all attendees and their COVID questionnaires in order to adequately report and contact trace on personnel. Now that we’ve got everything in place, we are excited to (safely, from a distance) see each other in person. Who knew you could miss an office — and its people — so much?
Interested in seeing CalendarAnything and RSVP in action? Contact us.
