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

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.

Health and safety check app comes to life

The development team at VELCO got busy and in just over a week (55 hours to be exact) they built and rolled out the new Health and Safety web app. It was based on HCL Volt MX and could be accessed from anywhere. The new app walked employees through questions about their location and a series of Covid-related questions, and then the employee would submit their “health screen” profile via the app. This became the way for the management team to monitor the health, location, and overall well-being of the entire organization.

This information was presented in an executive dashboard that the Health & Safety and Human Resources department could view and provide subsequent guidance to the employees. For example, when office presence was required of an employee, their health status was checked and, with their location known, they would receive customized travel guidelines. And, if at any point an employee needed help, that would be quickly discovered within the app and addressed, as needed.

Health and safety checks at-a-glance

Both the VELCO management team and the employees are very happy with the application. The management team appreciates that they have a dashboard view of the overall health of the company’s workforce, which is essential to conducting business during a pandemic. The employees find the app to be both helpful for their daily work and easy to use, and by keeping the organization informed in this way it fosters teamwork, collaboration and conveys care for co-workers across the organization. A win for all!