Why We Built Employee Vaccine Tracking Software

When the pandemic first hit, our team, like most others, temporarily went fully remote.

In the months that followed, we prioritized finding ways to continue making Eden Workplace a great company to work at, even if the physical “place” was harder to visit. This included running virtual culture events and revamping our remote work policy to make it easier for people to work where they felt best.

When COVID vaccines started becoming widely available to the general public in the spring, a new conversation opened.

Many of our team members who remained in San Francisco missed the ability to work from the office—and, as we later learned through a study we did with Wakefield Research, so did 85% of American workers. We knew we wanted to reopen our office but were hesitant to do so before we felt we could do it safely.

Once our team was beginning to get vaccinated, we considered the right process to enable folks to return.

Our manual process for vaccine tracking

We rolled out a company policy that anyone who was going to visit the office had to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Our People Operations Manager, Jenna Kramsky, carefully took on the task of managing the new policy, which required a lot of time-consuming spreadsheet oversight, emails and Slack messages with sensitive information, and team questions.

The manual process was a hassle and caused headaches

My guess is if you’ve implemented a vaccine mandate for your hybrid office, what I just described probably sounds pretty familiar.

If so, then like us, you’ve probably experienced headaches over manual vaccine tracking.

Important tasks need real tools

Our manual process took a ton of Jenna’s bandwidth and made it hard for the People team to stay organized.

Also, from a privacy perspective, sharing sensitive health information in an informal web of Slack messages, emails, and spreadsheets felt inadequate. We wanted a tool that met the needs of the moment, and gave our full company confidence that we were utilizing best practices.

A spreadsheet alone doesn’t restrict office access

At Eden Workplace, we use our own desk booking software to enable team members to select a seat at our office, pending successful completion of their health questionnaire in our team safety product.

We needed a system that limited who could come into the office based on their vaccination status. However, our manual solution for vaccine tracking did not jive with our otherwise tech-forward approach to enabling workplace access.

Unless Jenna wanted to hand-verify on a daily basis that only vaccinated people were booking desks, we needed a better way forward.

So, what did we do?

As a software company with the mission to create a better place to work for everyone, the path forward was clear. We decided to build a sophisticated vaccine record keeping system into our software as an expansion of our team safety tools and integrate it with our desk booking system.

How our employee vaccine tracking software works

Based on our own headaches with our original process, we knew it was critical to make it easy for team members to safely upload their vaccination cards and other relevant information. We also wanted to keep it simple for admins to access the data and approve their team members to work in-person.

We also knew that enabling customization would be critical for most customers, as different companies have different vaccination and office access policies for their team members, sometimes varying within the same company by geography.  

We also kept in mind that while our own office policy required vaccination, there are many other companies (including those impacted by President Biden’s vaccine mandate) who need the ability to verify negative COVID-19 test results for employees who aren’t vaccinated.

Why vaccine tracking is a priority

Occasional in-office collaboration is part of our company’s culture.

To be transparent, we recently surveyed our team and found that the "long distance" relationship imposed on us by the pandemic was making our team feel less connected. We wanted to be able to feel the rush and warmth that comes with building community and friendships in-person, and we felt that some types of collaborative and creative work were more enjoyable and productive in-person, too.

That said, we were not willing to sacrifice safety for community, despite both being important. Our manual process was a start, but our new vaccine tracking system added credibility, ease, and precision to an important process. Plus, we felt it could be impactful to thousands of other companies.

If you are looking for a way to verify employee vaccine statuses and ensure only vaccinated employees or those with negative test results are working in person, I hope you’ll check out our solution.

Feel free to email us at growth@edenworkplace.com to learn more, or schedule a demo using the button at the bottom of this page.

Best,

Joe Du Bey

CEO // Eden Workplace