COVID-19: IISc’s free ‘workplace readiness indicator’ attracts overseas attention

By Qamar ZJ

Last month, we wrote about the free ‘workplace readiness’ tool released by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). The latest is that this nifty resource to measure a firm’s COVID-19 preparedness has attracted attention from overseas. “We were contacted by a company in South Africa that wanted to make use of our open-source code for customising the tool for their context, and their provincial government was considering to deploy it,” says Dr Preetam Patil, Centre for Networked Intelligence, Indian Institute of Science. “Another developer from Nagaland informed us that he had drawn ideas from our tool to develop a similar version for his state.”

Indian firms are just as happy

That’s not all. The Indian companies are just as pleased. One such firm had this to say: “The workplace readiness indicator is an amazing tool. We’d just like to add a small point that after the assessment, in suggestions (the last column), can we have a ready list of vendors who provide ‘Sanitization’ as per norms and have a trained workforce? Many service providers are immature and don’t have proper machines, equipment & chemicals.”

Refined tool

Constant improvement is the credo at IISc. During the development of this tool, when feedback was sought from the firms, one crucial input was data secrecy. The companies were hesitant in sharing details about their infrastructure and employee strength. “Therefore, we decided to retain the ‘self-assessment’ aspect, and not forcing users to reveal their organization’s identity,” says Patil. “If users provide their valid email ID and register, they receive updates over email. But we don’t enforce email validation to enable organisations to generate a self-assessment score without registering.”

200 entries so far…

So far, IISc has recorded close to 200 entries and 5000 visits to the website. “About 48% correspond to the IT/ITES sector, followed by 14% for R&D, 8% for Manufacturing, and 7% for government,” says Patil. In one case study, the tool helped a large R&D organisation with several labs. “The staff was keen to fill in accurate data despite the effort involved in the collection of every lab’s staff and student data,” says Patil. “They were thrilled with the readiness score as it validated the COVID-19 protocols they had in place.”

‘This tool is more relevant than ever’

As workplaces are ramping up their operations, despite the epidemic clearly not past its peak, it is easy to lose sight of the precautions due to the lengthy Standard Operating Procedures and Covid-19 fatigue in general. “Our readiness tool can serve as a handy planner for common precautions as it organised into different readiness categories,” says Patil. “As more and more organisations from various categories use it, the tool evaluates the organisation’s readiness among its peers, which we provide as a percentile rank within its own category.”

Get the tool now for free

If you are a proactive firm who wants to future-proof its workplace, this tool can be quite handy in containing the coronavirus.