When COVID-19 hit, suddenly many of us had to adjust to an entirely new work atmosphere. Social distancing became crucial to slowing the spread, and within weeks, remote working arrangements became the norm for more half of the country. Now, even with many businesses around the country reopening, many people have mixed feelings about returning to the office. As of mid-May, 7 in 10 American workers were still working remotely all or part of the time, and just 1 in 4 say that they would return to the office if it was up to them.¹

As they look to reopen, businesses may need to find innovative solutions that will reassure their workers that they are taking serious precautions to protect employee health. 

Masks and temperature checks may become more common in the workplace, at least for a while. But the increased desire to maintain social distancing, and the potential for future temporary regional lockdowns to prevent a second wave, may help fuel some bigger changes and modernizations in many offices. Here are some of the new technologies and services that can help businesses provide a safe working environment while also adding new conveniences and cost saving opportunities.

Contactless Lobbies

Protecting against a virus that can easily spread through common interactions will mean limiting as much face-to-face communication as possible. That person-to-person contact often begins with a greeting in the reception area, but that no longer needs to be the case. Exela’s Intelligent Kiosks enable guests to check in with zero human interaction. Greet guests with a pre-recorded message rather than a living, breathing, potentially contagious human, and allow them to self-register, confirm their arrival, get directions, and print their guest badge. The kiosk will even send an automated notification to the host so that they know exactly where the guest is and when they arrived.

Of course, sometimes it’s nice to be able to interact with an actual human rather than a software system, despite the threat of transferable illnesses. If a guest requires assistance with the check-in process, the Intelligent Kiosk allows them to summon a Virtual Lobby Ambassador at any time via text, audio, or video chat. A Virtual Lobby Ambassador will assist your guests with their needs or answer any questions they may have.

Mobile Facility Passes

The fact that we all carry devices capable of receiving emails and image files without physical contact can make it much easier to continue to follow social distancing guidelines, even as offices reopen. For example, a Mobile Facility Pass, stored on a visitor’s smartphone, allows both employees and guests a contactless solution for displaying security clearance. It can also be used to share useful information like maps of the building or WiFi login information, all without the need for face-to-face interaction. 

Intelligent Lockers

As we all adjust to the constraints of social distancing, contactless delivery has become a popular option for those hoping to make purchases and support businesses without risking the trip to potentially crowded shopping centers or stores. Smart lockers enable contactless delivery in a number of ways, while also providing a convenient storage option for employees.

Exela’s Intelligent Lockers can be accessed through the built-in touchscreen interface, but they can just as well be integrated with RFID, QR code, or biometric recognition technologies for a fully touchless experience. Intelligent Lockers offer flexible layouts and designs, improved access controls, anytime availability, and complete chain-of-custody tracking. They provide an excellent contactless means of exchanging, shipping, receiving, or storing goods.

Digital Mailrooms

Intelligent Lockers are great at limiting face-to-face interactions in the delivery process, but a fully integrated Digital Mailroom can take it even one step further. With Digital Mailroom, your physical mail is rerouted to a secure processing facility where it can be scanned and digitized with advanced ICR and OCR technology for completely electronic delivery. This not only helps keep your workers safe, but also centralizes your communications, and enables remote workers to access important business mail from wherever they happen to be.

Exela Smart Office solutions like these make it easier for workers to return to the office with confidence. The convenience and security these solutions provide will help keep people safe, put minds at ease, and help everyone adjust to the next normal.

COVID-19 is impacting more than just the way businesses operate their physical offices. Learn more about how the pandemic is speeding up companies’ digital transformation.

1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/311375/reviewing-remote-work-covid.aspx

The impacts of COVID-19 have not been limited to public health. The ongoing pandemic has caused significant economic problems - problems which digital transformation can help businesses mitigate.

As millions of people across the world limit their movement and avoid public gathering spaces to slow the spread of COVID-19, supply chains and cash flows have seen massive disruption. More than 100,000 small businesses have closed permanently as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The same study, conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago found that at least 2% of small businesses are gone.¹

The skyrocketing unemployment numbers provide another clear indication of the severity of COVID-19’s economic toll. As of this writing, the number of unemployment claims in the US since the beginning of the pandemic in mid-March has surpassed 40 million, meaning about 1 in 4 Americans are out of work.²

It’s clear that COVID-19 is exacting a heavy economic toll. What steps can businesses take to lessen the blow and facilitate a speedy recovery in the wake of such a disaster?

How Businesses Survive Crises

Disaster can take many forms, but they really all boil down to two central problems﹘loss of assets and restricted cash flows. Luckily, there are several ways businesses can protect themselves and their assets.

For example, most businesses have some form of insurance to protect property assets from physical damage caused by fires, floods, or vandalism. In many cases, the government will also offer various forms of aid for business impacted by a disaster. In this particular crisis, the US government is stepping in to help small businesses with initiatives like the CARES Act and the Paycheck Protection Program, but these stopgap measures will only go so far, and businesses will have to take their own steps to ensure their long-term well-being.

Still, it’s best not to let your disaster recovery plan depend too much on insurance payouts or government assistance. A rainy day fund can help keep your business afloat until you’re able to get up and running again. Another viable long-term option for maintaining business continuity is investing in business process automation technology and your company’s digital transformation.

Digital Transformation as a Path Forward

For years, digital transformation has been a subject of interest for business leaders, yet the current conditions are making it more appealing than ever. With COVID-19 causing widespread business disruptions, the cost savings, efficiency gains, and disaster recovery protections digital transformation can bring to bear look particularly attractive.

There are several types of business process automation that can help companies adapt:

1. Digitization

COVID-19 has spurred immense progress in remote work, as organizations who once may have been reticent to allow it have been forced to work around or remove old barriers to enable their employees to work from the safety of their own homes. A Deloitte survey found that around 25% of people were working from home at least once a week before the pandemic, while 34% expect to work from home at least once a week post-crisis.³ While the number of people working from home is likely to fall as regions ease social distancing guidelines, remote work will permanently be more common in the next normal.

Digitizing paper-based processes is a key step to enabling remote work. For example, switching from traditional mailroom services to a solution like Exela’s Digital Mailroom transforms all incoming paper mail and other documents into fully digital assets, centralizing communications in an electronic format that can be easily accessed by employees no matter where they are.

2. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic automation isn’t just for manufacturing assembly lines. The digital bots that perform RPA tasks can be programmed to perform a wide variety of repetitive, rule-based software tasks quickly and efficiently with high levels of accuracy, freeing up their human coworkers for more engaging, higher-value work.

RPA is a cost-effective quick-to-implement solution that can benefit many facets of your business. Everything from data entry, data normalization, and multi-database search, to CRM data management and sales lead prospecting can be performed by bots with greater speed and accuracy than humans. And in the wake of COVID-19, when employees may not be able to perform all of their vital functions remotely, RPA presents a potentially business-saving value.

3. Cognitive Automation

Robotic process automation can help businesses survive disasters by putting bots to work on basic digital functions, freeing up workers and ensuring that critical functions continue to operate. Cognitive automation takes it a step further, performing more complicated tasks like context-driven decision making and data handling based on complex relationships. Utilizing advanced AI and machine learning, cognitive automation programs are capable of performing tasks that would typically require human-level reasoning abilities.

A basic use of one type of cognitive automation is how smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home use natural language processing and machine learning to do things like interpret questions and search databases for the most relevant answers. One of the most common ways businesses are putting this kind of technology to use is incorporating it into their customer service experience. While a chatbot or automated helpdesk may not be quite on par with a human representative, this kind of system can help businesses manage surges in requests and extend their operating hours.

Cognitive automation can provide a significant boost to productivity and speed up important workflows. It’s value is likely to increase now that we are seeing an uptick in remote work and distributed teams.

COVID-19 has presented major new challenges for individuals and businesses alike. However, the trajectory of business towards digital transformation remains the same. As economies open back up and stabilize, we’ll continue to see more automation and digitization of business processes, not only as a means to increase productivity, but also to protect against an unknown future.

Digital transformation can help businesses handle uncertainty - and not just from global pandemics. To learn more about how similar solutions can be applied to navigate other major world events, check out One Thing the Pandemic and Brexit Have in Common.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/12/small-business-used-define-americas-economy-pandemic-could-end-that-forever/
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/business/economy/coronavirus-unemployment-claims.html
3. https://www2.deloitte.com/ch/en/pages/human-capital/articles/how-covid-19-contributes-to-a-long-term-boost-in-remote-working.html

What is a Digital Mailroom?

A “digital mailroom” automates the full range of processes that would ordinarily otherwise be performed by your mailroom staff -- except without the need for mailroom staff, or even, for that matter, a mailroom. Digitizing your incoming mail is an important and reassuringly simple step toward digital transformation, which is where at least 98% of all businesses are heading in any event. It improves workplace efficiency, precision, and transparency, as we explain here. By rendering mail essentially “location-agnostic,” a digital mailroom supports the seemingly inevitable transition to remote work culture, not to mention the culture of corporate sustainability.

How it works

The process begins with a simple one-time instruction to the United States Postal Service to forward your incoming mail to one of 70 designated Exela processing centers, which instruction can be implemented in as few as 7 to 10 days and is reversible any time at your discretion. Thereafter, for as long as you wish to continue with the service, Exela receives your mail and uses state-of-the-art technology (including OCR-powered data extraction and proprietary AI-powered scanning for which we were recently awarded a patent) to intelligently digitize, index, and sort the content. The digitized content is then securely e-routed to the intended recipients. At the same time, it is also now immediately available for entry into all your workflows that utilize digital content.

Join us as we follow a piece of incoming paper mail through the Digital Mailroom process here.

Why Exela’s Digital Mailroom?

Exela’s Digital Mailroom happens to feature one of the world’s fastest scanning platforms. In fact, there’s virtually no faster way to digitize and route incoming documents. With 70 Exela processing centers around the world that support Exela’s Digital Mailroom activities, you can choose a center that’s convenient in case you ever want to pop in to pay your paper mail a visit.  In addition to digitizing your incoming mail, Exela’s Digital Mailroom can be used to digitize, index, and route paper records, including backlog, into the appropriate hands, as well any number of automated workflows (for example, medical records management).

Here’s a quick video tour through Exela’s Digital Mailroom.

Why it’s right for your law firm

A crown jewel in the Exela Smart Office suite of solutions, Exela’s Digital Mailroom has been particularly helpful to our law firm customers. Some reasons why include:

• Automatic digitization of content that for use in drafting.
• Establishing a firmwide source of truth about a particular client or matter.
• Entry of digitized content into legal industry-specific automated work flows such as these four you definitely want to know about.
• Supports faster response times to conflict-of-interest inquiries.
• Supports firmwide search capabilities for fast and informed answers to queries.
• Automated redaction commands, including batch redaction for enhanced security requirements, including “Chinese Walls.”

Learn how Exela’s Digital Mailroom was a game-changer for this large L.A.-based law firm during the COVID-19 pandemic.

When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, many businesses around the world suddenly found themselves having to accommodate remote working arrangements for the sake of their employees’ and the public’s health. The transition has proven challenging for both businesses and employees.¹ But remote working can boost morale, productivity, and savings,² while also supporting the goal of environmental sustainability³ --provided it’s done correctly, using the necessary technological tools.

Many employees suspected as much long before the pandemic, and
over the last few years have increasingly been seeking out flexibility in the workplace.⁴ And the technology is there to accommodate the demand. While no one would have picked a global pandemic to catalyze a remote work revolution, it appears that is precisely what has happened. The novel coronavirus outbreak is exposing more people to working remotely than ever. Many will grow accustomed to the benefits, and businesses wishing to stay competitive in the race to attract talent will have to continue supporting it going forward.

Thus far, remote work appears to be a good thing for business. As McKinsey points out, working remotely can boost productivity by boosting morale: “Employees who spend less time travelling or commuting and have a better work-life balance are likely to be more motivated and ready to mobilize in extreme situations.”⁵ The remote work “experiment” mandated by the coronavirus pandemic could put to rest any lingering doubts that workers can be productive and motivated outside the traditional office.

Our hope is that for the outbreak and resulting worldwide pivot to remote work will prove the viability of remote work, not just as part of a fully functional business continuity plan but also as part of a business-as-usual business plan. Here at Exela, here are some of the solutions we offer that can help make that happen for your business:

• Digital Mailroom
• Transactional Print and Mail
• Medical Records Management

As you work through these challenging times, we hope you’ll find this glossary of COVID-19 terms helpful. For more on the topic of remote work, you’ll want to check out COVID-19: A Tipping Point for Remote Work, a special edition of PluggedIN, Exela's thought leadership news magazine, providing fresh insights from the cutting edge every quarter. We’re offering it absolutely free.

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1. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/a-blueprint-for-remote-working-lessons-from-china
2. https://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/brags/news-releases
3. https://www.capital-ges.com/the-environmental-benefits-of-remote-working/
4. https://www.fastcompany.com/90481356/were-in-the-midst-of-a-massive-work-from-home-experiment-what-if-it-works
5. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/a-blueprint-for-remote-working-lessons-from-china

Yesterday, as I was walking my rescue hound, Lucille Ball (newly adopted, thanks to COVID-19’s having made me a homebody for who knows how long), a woman walking her own dog paused to allow the pups to greet one another.

“It’s so hard being quarantined,” she remarked from six feet away.

“Wait, you’re quarantined?” I demanded as I hastily backed away.

“Well, like everyone…you know. Right?” She was looking at me, kind of puzzled.

“You mean ‘social distancing’?”

Yeah, I’m that person. The one who corrects you if you say “quarantine” when you mean “social distancing” ... not to be unpleasant, but because the way I see it, saying “quarantine” when you mean “social distancing” is like saying “aircraft carrier” when you mean “kayak”. And now that “COVID-19” has gone from an “outbreak” to an “epidemic” to a “pandemic,” with “confirmed cases” steadily inching toward 100,000, it’s a near certainty that when talking about the illness caused by the novel “coronavirus,” you’re going to fumble your terms, at least some of the time.

Or is it? Obnoxiously word-fixated people like me aside, there’s something to be said for knowing your coronavirus terminology, even if it’s just to make sense of the daily news updates. So, here is a glossary of terms to help you make sense of the inevitable daily information overload:

Coronavirus: One of the viruses in the family of viruses that has a spiky “crown”-like appearance under a microscope. These range in severity from the common cold to the far more deadly SARS (see definition) and MERS (see definition) viruses.

MERS: Short for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a highly contagious virus that was first seen and reported in Saudi Arabia during 2012

SARS: Short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), a viral respiratory illness caused by a coronavirus, and which was first seen and reported in February 2003, at which time a global outbreak occurred. It was subsequently contained.

SARS-CoV-2: Another abbreviation for COVID-19. It refers to the fact that COVID-19 is a SARS illness caused by a coronavirus.

COVID-19: The World Health Organization gave this name to the illness caused by the new coronavirus that first appeared in China in late 2019. It’s short for "coronavirus disease 2019.”

Outbreak: A sudden increase in diagnoses of a particular illness.

Pandemic: An "outbreak" affecting large populations or a whole region, country, or continent (as compared to an "epidemic," which affects a particular community).

Contagious: An adjective meaning “capable of spreading an illness.” The issue with COVID-19 is the length of time during which people are “contagious,” which might be for as long as 14 days from the time they are first infected with it. See “Incubation Period” below).

Incubation Period: The incubation period is the time between exposure to an illness and actually showing symptoms. People exposed to COVID-19 can take up to 14 days to show symptoms. This long incubation period is one reason COVID-19 has spread so effectively.

Containment: This refers to the effort to limit the spread of illness. Some illnesses have been contained via vaccination, but COVID-19 has no vaccination or treatment as of yet. Therefore, “containment” is accomplished via "social distancing," “isolation,” and “quarantine” (see definitions below)

Close Contact: Being with 6 feet of another person such that a “droplet” from one person could land on the other person or something the other person is wearing or holding.

Droplet: A particle of moisture from the respiratory system. Droplets expelled by someone infected with COVID-19 can spread the COVID-19 virus to another person if that second person touches the droplet and introduces it into their own respiratory system (by touching their eyes, lips, or nose).

Airborne Transmission: This is also accomplished via droplet, but a much smaller droplet - one that is small enough to be imperceptible in the air. Most COVID-19 cases are not transmitted this way.

Confirmed Case: A person who tests positive for COVID-19 via a CDC-approved lab.

Presumptive Positive Test Result: A positive test for COVID-19 that was performed by a local or state health laboratory. Presumptive becomes “confirmed” when testing is conducted in a CDC-approved lab.

Curve: A graphic representation of the number of new cases of a disease over a given period of time. The more cases in that period of time, the steeper the curve, and the greater the burden on the healthcare system.

Face Mask: Loose-fitting paper or cloth masks that form a physical barrier between the wearer and other people, with the purpose being to prevent the wearer from spreading germs when they sneeze or cough. They also can remind the wearer not touch their face.

Respirator: For COVID-19 purposes, a respirator is not a machine to help one breathe a type of face mask that doesn’t just act as a barrier but also filters out virus particles before they can be inhaled.

N95 respirator: A respirator that filters out 95% of virus particles. This is the gold standard or healthcare workers and are in short supply now.

Ventilator: A machine that moves air in and out of the lungs in the case that a patient cannot, or is having trouble breathing on their own. Unfortunately, this happens all too often in COVID-19 cases.

Quarantine: The separation of someone who has been diagnosed with an illness, has symptoms of the illness, or has reason to believe they were exposed to the illness, from other people. The duration of a quarantine is guided by the incubation period for the particular illness. Quarantine can be imposed on a person or self-administered.

Social Distancing: Is the practice of maintaining enough distance between yourself and another person to reduce the risk of breathing in droplets that are produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes. In a community, social distancing measures may include limiting or cancelling large gatherings of people.

Shelter-in-place: Finding a safe location and staying there while the crisis continues.

Lockdown: When you see this word, please know it is not an official, technical, or legal word. Rather it’s just a word people use to a non-technical word that people use to refer to any kind of public health measures being taken to prevent the virus spreading.

Spanish Flu: You're likely, at least at some point, to hear COVID-19 compared to, and contrasted with Spanish Flu. Active between April of 1918 and December 1920, this flu, which most likely originated in China but that got its name from the nation that, at least initially, put out the most media coverage of the outbreak (this was a function of wartime politics). The scary thing is that 100 million people died worldwide. The good news is we are so much better equipped to practice social distancing one than we were back in 1918. See, for example. Exela’s Digital Mailroom allows an office to function even without a mailroom or other support staff.

State-of-emergency: Declaring a state of emergency gives government officials the authority to take extra measures to protect the public, such as suspending regulations or reallocating funds to mitigate the spread of a disease.

CDC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the U.S.'s health protection agency and a leading reliable source for COVID-19 updates for the U.S.).

WHO: The World Health Organization, which is an agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health.

Here at the Exela Blog, we strive to bring you only the most reliable, accurate, news that is relevant to you. Stay tuned for more COVID-19 content, including more about how to make remote working work for your company, which COVID-19 “offers” are really just scams, and best practices for remaining uninfected.

As of March 12, 2020, a novel form of coronavirus known as COVID-19 has infected at least 118,000 people and killed more than 4,000 worldwide. Yet up until that date, many businesses the world over had not yet put business continuity plans into place. Concerned this stemmed from an “infodemic” of not-quite-accurate information, the World Health Organization (WHO) has stepped in to clarify that COVID-19 is, in fact, contagious but also capable of containment if the right measures are taken. Therefore, in an effort to galvanize action to fight the further spread of illness, the WHO has declared the outbreak a “pandemic.” And with that, businesses the world over found themselves doing the thing many had fervently hoped to avoid: sending their employees home with instructions to work remotely.

Why so much resistance to remote work?

With more and more companies deploying digital transformation initiatives, remote work has increasingly become a topic of interest, both to businesses and to their employees. Nevertheless, a surprising number of businesses do not yet have in place the infrastructure necessary to offer remote work as an option--even under the best of circumstances, let alone in times like these, where an unexpected turn of events has mandated remote work for the sake of public health. Of the businesses already up-and-running with remote employees, many presumed that even with some employees working remotely, others would be in the office holding down the fort--answering phones, making copies, opening mail, etc. What no one could have fathomed (outside of a dystopian novel) was a situation like the one at hand--one which transformed offices into veritable ghost-towns, even as business was meant to continue as usual.

But, hey, you’ve got this

That being said, once you realize “this is actually happening,” certain things will just naturally fall into place. For example, it’s easy enough to equip employees with laptops. It’s probably even comforting to schedule daily check-ins with your working group, whether via phone, text, or one of the more modern communication tools you’ve already been using. And email, well, thank goodness for email--because everyone uses email. Right? And nothing can fall through the cracks when you’re conducting business on email. Right?

Except...what about mail?

Not e-mail. Real mail. Mail-mail. Snail mail. Post office mail - not to mention FedEx, UPS, and the like. What we’re talking about here is all the mail that is not electronically delivered, and, now that we’re thinking about it, there is quite a lot of it. And we’re not talking about junk mail here. We’re talking important mail. Mail that’s critical to your core business. Tax bills. Tax refunds. Certified mail. Notarized documents. A notice your property is subject to a zoning dispute. A request to appear at an administrative proceeding. Subpoenas and other time-sensitive legal requests and correspondence. For that matter, any time-sensitive correspondence that the sender chose to send the old-fashioned way. Because it happens, and it happens a lot.

But there’s a solution. A simple and rapidly deployable solution, in fact.

Digital Mailroom keeps you in business even with no one in the office

Simply put, Exela’s Digital Mailroom seamlessly automates the full range of processes otherwise performed by your mailroom staff. When you sign up for Digital Mailroom, your incoming paper documentation is automatically re-routed¹ to a designated Exela processing center, where our highly trained professionals scan and transform it into a digital format. Using state-of-the-art technology, including OCR-powered data extraction and our proprietary AI-powered scanning solutions, Digital Mailroom then goes to work, intelligently extracting, indexing, and sorting the digitized contents of your incoming mail, and routing it securely to the intended recipients.

Digital Mailroom isn’t new here at Exela. Businesses of all sizes around the world are already successfully using Digital Mailroom to transform incoming paper into secure, searchable, workflow-ready, actionable digital assets. A crown jewel in the Exela Smart Office suite of solutions, Exela’s Digital Mailroom makes remote work both possible and profitable--not only in extreme circumstances such as these, but in all circumstances.

^[1] Re-routing is accomplished via the USPS within 7-10 days and is terminable upon request to the USPS