How FacilityQuest Responds to COVID-19
Respond quickly
First and foremost, FacilityQuest is an agile way to start documenting—and respond quickly to—new needs in the workplace. The origin of our workplace solution is with project-based utilization studies that start and end within a few weeks. So all information related to documenting spaces and gathering data about the activities in those spaces has to be easily and quickly acquired. We’ve leveraged this agility into a subscription-based workplace tool, and we work with you one-on-one to avoid the pain of a learning curve.
Set Proximity Policy for Spaces; Find Non-Compliance
Newly important in this COVID world is making sure that people stay socially distant from each other in order to avoid greater chances of infection. In FacilityQuest the calculation of areas leads to the calculation of “distance between” spaces. Users of FacilityQuest get started fast by uploading PDFs of floor plans and dropping blue dots on the plans to represent spaces. These blue dots not only link to many types of information about the space, but their position on the floor plan can also be measured from any other defined space. You can now set a rule for how far apart spaces should be, and then see violations of that rule as red dots on the floor plan. Reset the rule and see new results immediately. Report to management what percent of spaces violated your rule, or report what the minimum distance between spaces is that creates no violations.
Re-set and Report on Changing Room Capacities
NOT new in FacilityQuest is the ability to manage and change room or space capacities at any level of granularity. So for instance if your “large meeting rooms” have an intended pre-COVID capacity of 18, you could--individually or as a room type group--reset capacities to “9”.
Shown in the screen below is the scenario of managing all room capacities at once, without any attempt to manage the context of any specific room. In this “brute force” example, any capacity of “10” now becomes “5.” It’s like a search-and-replace. Of course you can still change rooms individually to any capacity, and you can also change a given group of rooms with the same type all at once.
COVID Assets
If you track assets in a spreadsheet, this might be the time it becomes urgent to also “see” the assets on a floor plan. Every space on a floor plan can have assets assigned to it, and when you search for a type of asset (such as “plexiglass dividers” or “free standing air filters”) the spaces they are assigned to are highlighted on the relevant floor plans.
Document One-Way Walking Paths
FacilityQuest sets a high priority on visual documentation as well as being able to list and report on workplace data. So if you have put effort into implementing policy for one-way walking paths, then show those walking paths on the floor plans. It’s an important visual cue for anyone looking at the facility documentation on what’s been implemented.
If and when you need to take data on employee behavior to understand if your walking path policies make sense to the occupants, the FacilityQuest utilization data gathering module works well for small or ad hoc studies in this scenario.