A “Powerful” App to Ensure Employee Health and Well-Being

The Challenge

Urgent need for new app

The Vermont Electric Power Co (VELCO), founded in 1956, is an electric transmission-only utility, the first of its kind in the nation. Headquartered in Rutland, Vermont, it manages 730 miles of transmission lines, 1500 miles of fiber optic cable, 65 transmission facilities and 55 radio sites across the state. A customer of the HCL Volt MX technology since 2017, the organization had 14 apps in operation for field and office personnel and a few more apps on the horizon, but on March 13, 2020, an urgent reason for a new app emerged. And it was needed fast. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, all 150 employees moved to a work-from-home arrangement, and it quickly became obvious to the VELCO management team that it needed a way to communicate company information out to employees and to also conduct health checks on them to ensure they were both informed and safe. In May, when more information surfaced from the health department about health checks and requirements for safely returning to the office became available, the Health and Safety department at VELCO began by building a health check form, that employees would fill in and submit by email. The management team soon determined that it would be more efficient to replace this “paper-based” process of emailing in a form with a web app for conducting health checks and providing guidance to the entire organization that the employees could access from anywhere.