With COVID-19 surging, we’re opening the Envoy Protect beta to the world.

Employers face numerous challenges in reopening workplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is particularly true as case counts rise dramatically in some locations and fall in others. Employers have to ensure their workplaces are hygienic and touch-free with complex sanitation programs. They have to manage new and challenging capacity limits. And they must put plans in place to trace contacts should an outbreak of the virus occur in their facilities. From talking to hundreds of workplace leaders, we know it’s not easy.But Envoy Protect is built to address these challenges...and more. In May we launched our newest product to a small group of customers in a closed beta. In just thirty days over 2,000 companies have signed up for the program - a response beyond our wildest expectations. Today, we’re excited to share some updates on the product and how Envoy intends to support the return to the workplace.

The journey to open beta

The Envoy Protect beta started with seven customers across different industries and office sizes. We worked closely with them to identify the most important return to work issues they faced, and used their insights to refine our roadmap. For the last few weeks we’ve been launching new functionality and improvements to the product based on their feedback. At the same time, we’ve added hundreds of additional customers to the program. It’s been thrilling to see their usage grow exponentially as they roll Envoy Protect out to their workplaces. Based on these early successes, we believe Protect is ready to help more companies return to the workplace.Since May, we’ve launched improvements to Protect that will empower admins to manage their most important return to work needs:

• Admins now can manage workplace capacity and can limit each office location to a specific number of employees. Admins can inform employees when a site reaches capacity, ensuring social distancing requirements are met.
• Admins can now require that employees go through a wellness check and meet the company’s criteria before they enable an employee’s badge for the day.
• Admins can now make additional customizations of the employee registration process, including more complex screening questions and links to workplace policies.
• Admins can now customize what time employees must self-certify to visit the workplace, location by location.
• Admins now have access to the earliest version of our contact tracing tools.

Capacity management at a glance

With COVID-19, Employers must follow new rules about how many people can be in their office and still adhere to social distance guidelines. Depending on where they are located and what phase of reopening they’re at, they may have to operate at half capacity or less. Envoy Protect’s new capacity management functionality has been designed to solve these challenges for workplace teams. Admins can set capacity limits for every site, see the current site occupancy, and get early notifications of projected usage and available capacity.

Employees can go to Envoy Mobile to register for work and respond to the company’s wellness check questionnaire. If the workplace is at capacity, Envoy Mobile will inform them that they are not allowed to register or enter the space. When Employers using Envoy Protect link their access control system to Envoy, Envoy becomes the system of record for enforcing capacity limits across all their sites. And don’t worry - there are simple workarounds for administrators who need to make exceptions.

Access control now tightly integrated with Protect

As Employers reopen and welcome employees back to work, they will need to think carefully about who has access to their space. Rather than giving their employees unlimited access to the office, they’ll need to make sure that only those who have been approved to come to work are able to enter the building. By integrating Envoy Protect with their access control system, Admins will be able to give building access to employees who have successfully registered, completed a wellness check, and have been approved to come to work. This helps make sure that only healthy, approved individuals are allowed into your space to give you more control over capacity and reduce the spread of germs.

Envoy Protect currently integrates with Openpath, Kisi, S2, and Genetec. We plan to release more access control integrations over the coming weeks and months.

Open beta is open now!

The most important Envoy Protect functionality is working smoothly. And now that thousands of employees worldwide are using Protect for a safe return to work, we’re ready to open up the beta to everyone. That said, this is a “beta” product - we know it isn’t perfect yet. This means we’ll continue to host regular discussions with our customers to learn what’s working and what’s not. Based on that feedback, we’ll continue to introduce fixes, improvements and features over the coming months. This includes alerts about employees who don’t pass screening, improvements to our analytics, and more per-site customization for companies that operate many sites or have employees who cannot use a mobile app.A couple of final, important notes:

• Using Envoy Protect does require an Envoy Visitors account. Don’t worry, it’s easy to sign up.
• If you want to link employee access control to self-certification, that requires participation in Envoy’s Enterprise Visitors plan.
• Finally, to set up and start using Protect, you need to be a Global Admin on your Envoy account.

If you’re ready to get started with Envoy Protect you can sign up and get started right now. If you’re running a large and complex operation, or if you’ve just got questions, please reach out to us directly. We’re happy to help and we’re excited to talk to you.