The Biden administration’s announcement of proposals to require private employers of 100 or more employees to mandate vaccinations for all employees (or a weekly COVID test) has created a whirlwind of questions. Should this be done by the federal government? Is it constitutional? Should this be up to the states instead? What will OSHA ultimately put into the new emergency temporary standards (ETS)? Do businesses actually want this? How are businesses supposed to manage this and avoid the fines?
What we know so far
Federal OSHA still needs to evaluate and incorporate this mandate into a new ETS to make it real, but legal experts anticipate that it will happen quickly.
The Biden administration has worked with vaccine distributors and has also collaborated with some of the nation’s largest retailers, including Amazon, Walmart and Kroger to ensure that rapid home test kits will be more broadly available (and at better prices) for consumers.
Some businesses are (secretly or overtly) pretty happy about this mandate despite the extra work they have to take on to manage vaccination and testing records. Case in point: according to a Forbes article on The Business Roundtable, there was high support for this mandate. Reasons for support range from the health of the citizens, reducing employee anxiety about returning to the office, using public transportation again and what will happen to cities’ tax revenue and crime levels if people don’t return to the office and spend money at restaurants, stores, gyms and other businesses.
How can businesses deal with this?
But how do companies actually go about managing vaccine mandates in reality? Managing all of the vaccination records of employees and getting that information from them could be done manually by taking pictures of each employee’s vaccination card, uploading it to a drive and updating it to a spreadsheet or adding a new record in a CRM, but none of these systems were uniquely designed for this purpose, leaving companies at potential risk or with additional work at at a time when businesses are struggling to fill job vacancies.
An easier, end-to-end solution exists today
The coming vaccine mandate doesn’t have to feel like getting jabbed. In fact, Kogniz can help you dramatically reduce the difficulties surrounding vaccine mandates and automatically create a paper trail of actions taken to ensure that your employees meet the coming deadlines to be established by Federal OSHA.
The Kogniz AssureAI platform allows your organization to track vaccination status, records, send reminders to employees to get their vaccines, that they can take time off to get the vaccines, and even be leveraged to enter employees into incentives programs to use the carrot versus a stick approach for vaccination promotion.
Released in April to help our manufacturing clients to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases in the workplace, Kogniz takes the difficult work of vaccine management and helps get that work done for you.
Kogniz allows you to can easily track vaccine participation rates, see a dashboard of which locations or departments need attention for getting vaccinations, send gentle reminders about a vaccine mandate in your organization and incentivize employees to get vaccinated—all while maintaining the privacy of your colleagues. Similarly, for those choosing weekly COVID testing in lieu of getting the vaccine, these reminders and documentation can also be integrated into Kogniz AssureAI. We also work with you to ensure that only those who need vaccine information are able to access it for privacy and security reasons.
Start the process now before it’s a rush
Learn how to operationalize the vaccine mandate, including vaccine administration data, surveys and workflows in Kogniz AssureAI, our SaaS-based platform for safety and security, to see how we're helping our customers to manage their vaccination programs, mask compliance, contact tracing and other workplace safety concerns.