Why Pennrose Chose WorkEQ to Protect their Residents and Staff

Overview

Pennrose has been creating and managing real estate developments since 1971 but faced a threat they have never encountered in 2020, a global pandemic. Property management and maintenance teams are essential employees and have been reporting to work throughout the shutdowns. The safety of their residents and employees has always been a priority for Pennrose, but that took on a whole new meaning this year, where they now needed to find a scalable solution that would allow them to screen their 400+ person workforce, across 10 states daily. After researching several potential solutions, they chose ReturnSafe to automate their screening and contact tracing efforts in both their corporate office as well as across their developments all over the country.

Challenge

Previously difficult to track who had symptoms or tested positive

Their corporate staff returned to the office on September 21st at 50% capacity, but the field service workforce has been essential throughout the pandemic, so they have been out at the properties this entire time. “We are in a unique situation in that we have hundreds of employees that are working in our 130+ properties in nearly a dozen states so we wanted a solution that would be easy to roll out, simple to use, and had a straightforward oversight process while giving our HR partners a platform to identify potential outbreak risks,” said John DeSantis, Vice President of Technology at Pennrose. Previously, the only way to track who had symptoms or who was testing positive was via email, making it difficult to track who was coming into contact with whom and generally what the situation was daily.

Solution

An easy to rollout, simple, and straightforward solution

The leadership team began searching for solutions to automate not only the daily screening process but also the contact tracing process in the event someone did test positive to contain the spread. The team wanted a solution that would be easy to roll out, simple to use, and that had a straightforward oversight process. The ability for HR to monitor who is filling out the daily survey and who is not, as well as who is infected and who is reporting to work was key.

Results

Seamless integration with a single sign-on solution

According to DeSantis, “After researching several potential solutions, we chose ReturnSafe to automate our screening and contact tracing efforts for both our corporate office as well as throughout our portfolio across the country. The seamless integration with a single sign-on solution for our employees to access and check-in daily was a critical component and one that the ReturnSafe team was able to deliver.”

Because they have over 400 employees at over 130 properties in 10 states, Pennrose needed a solution that was able to provide automation in terms of daily screening and contact tracing, but that also was able to integrate with their SAML identity manager as their workforce is constantly growing and changing. Having that employee data automatically flow into ReturnSafe is a big part of what makes the solution a smart choice for their team, as doing this manually is cumbersome. They also needed a solution that could work with their MDM, as they have over 200 iPhones that they manage. All in all, the daily screening reminders, ease of use, and straightforward access into daily insights on the HR side of things are what influenced their decision to implement ReturnSafe across the Pennrose organization.

“We are in a unique situation in that we have hundreds of employees that are working in our 130+ properties in nearly a dozen states so we wanted a solution that would be easy to roll out, simple to use, and had a straightforward oversight process while giving our HR partners a platform to identify potential outbreak risks. After researching several potential solutions, we chose ReturnSafe to automate our screening and contact tracing efforts for both our corporate office as well as across our developments across the country.”

John DeSantis
Vice President of Technology | Pennrose

Why Pennrose Chose ReturnSafe to Protect their Residents and Staff