Employee safety is vital to reopening your business. But there are other, long-term things to consider too: How do you make decisions? How do you engage customers? How do you serve society?
As organizations around the world begin reopening, there is no single playbook that makes sense for each and every business. Still, there are a core set of new operational processes that many businesses will need to implement, including employee wellness checking, contact tracing, and shift management, to name a few.
With this in mind, Salesforce launched Work.com on June 1st, a set of applications, resources, and content that have all been brought together under one platform to help businesses reopen as quickly and safely as possible. Work.com leverages functionality from other products in Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform and can be accessed from a single hub: the Workplace Command Center.
Any organization that has an office or is sending employees out into the field should consider implementing Work.com. Like with any Salesforce innovation though, there are steps you should take beforehand. While employee safety is a primary goal of this platform, it’s important to make sure that both employee and company data stays safe as well.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can move at the speed of innovation without risking access to the data driving your reopening forward.
1. Configuration
Because Work.com is focused on employees rather than customers, you should consider implementing these apps in a brand new org to ensure that employee data is secure and not mixed with your sales data. In addition to the Command Center, Salesforce added an employee data model with a set of new standard objects to help keep track of all the new information.
You may also want to migrate some existing records to your new Work.com org like basic employee contact and demographic information. Just make sure you do so with a cloud data protection platform in place. According to our survey results, Salesforce migration errors make up 8% of all data loss and corruption, and can occur when moving large volumes of data, consolidating data, or undergoing major transformations.
Whether you choose to implement Work.com in a new org or not, be sure to have a way to protect data and metadata with comprehensive, automated backups and rapid, stress-free recovery before you begin to configure.
2. Customization
In addition to its core suite of solutions, Work.com is intended to be an open platform that developers can access and build on based on their specific needs. Companies can integrate existing parts of their technical infrastructure into the platform to further enhance their command center.
There are flow templates, a page layout for the command center with key information from both what you collect and public data sets, dashboards for facilities managers, and more—all of it customizable to fit your individual needs and mobile-ready out of the box.
Work.com is just the latest example of cloud platforms that provide no-code to low-code options to support customization and integration. However, loose processes, coupled with inexperienced admins and developers can prove disastrous when mission-critical data is lost or corrupted. Poorly tested code is responsible for 7% of all data loss and corruption and a lack of relevant test data can cause serious corruption to data and metadata when the code is released into production, according to our survey mentioned earlier.
3. Integrations
Another way companies can enhance their Work.com is through third-party integrations. The way that the Workplace Command Center has been designed means partners and app builders will be building apps or components that integrate into the Workplace Command Center API.
For example, you could add MuleSoft to bring in data from external systems, Tableau to access data visualizations, and a cloud data protection platform from AppExchange like OwnBackup to eliminate data downtime.
Again, it's important that these integrations don’t impact other workflows or triggers, or alter data unexpectedly. Integration errors make up 8% of all data loss and corruption, and can occur when companies enrich their Salesforce platform by integrating internal systems and applications, according to our survey. The default configurations or changes made to configurations can result in unexpected behavior that could cause a data loss or corruption to occur.
4. Compliance
As businesses reopen, one of the biggest challenges will involve monitoring the health of employees to reduce the risk of spreading the virus within the office and beyond. This includes a self-reporting system enabling employees to share symptoms and positive COVID-19 tests with their employers.
Of course, with these new measures will come a slew of new employee health data to your org that will be subject to trust, security, and regulatory compliance requirements. Wellness surveys are asking employees about their medical status. Track and trace require consents far beyond those expected by any employee. What consents are visitors expected to sign and should they be covered by track and trace?
Companies in the healthcare, life sciences, and pharmaceutical industries, may be familiar with how to answer these questions. For most other businesses, they will need to review how they store and access certain types of employee data.
Government regulations increasingly target how companies store and use customer, employee, and sensitive health and financial data, making it difficult for companies to keep up with internal and external compliance requirements. Regulations like HIPAA for example, require exact copies of electronic Patient Health Information (PHI) to be backed up securely and business entities should be able to fully restore in the event of data loss. These backups should be frequent, tested, secure, encrypted, and stored offsite.
5. Adoption
As cloud apps and platforms are adopted, data volume and velocity are growing exponentially. In many cases, the complexity of the cloud has outpaced our ability to fully comprehend it, which means errors or corruptions can have cascading implications.
Though it’s built on the Salesforce platform, Work.com still involves new operational processes that employees are going to have to learn and adopt. Getting employees familiar with a new set of processes and applications while making sure they are entering clean data and staying compliant is critical.
Almost half of all Salesforce data loss and corruption incidents are caused by human error, according to our survey. Accidents can happen to anyone. More often than not, data lost or corrupted by human error is caused by having too many people with administrator permissions, which can lead to data loss or corruption that may go unnoticed for days or weeks.
In fact, Salesforce recommends that you create a separate Work.com Administrator profile with limited access, minimizing the risk of accidental data loss or corruption in your new Salesforce org.
During your Work.com implementation, protect data and metadata with comprehensive, automated backups and rapid, stress-free recovery. OwnBackup proactively prevents you from losing access to mission-critical Salesforce data, so you never have to worry about data loss disrupting your business—or your life.
