One of the largest privately held companies in Austin, TX is Four Hands—a furniture design and manufacturing firm on a quest to furnish style to customers around the globe. In 2019, Four Hands CEO, Matt Briggs was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Relying on their five company values: complete customer satisfaction, value the whole person, passion for excellence, honest and open communication, and have fun, the Four Hands team doubled their annual revenue in just five years. In Matt’s acceptance speech, he tellingly gushed over the key to the company’s jaw-dropping success: their employees.
Candace Bridges is the VP of Human Resources at Four Hands. Bridges and her team are responsible for taking care of their employees by managing programs like benefits, payroll, recruiting, employee engagement, health and safety, and company culture. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bridges’ team shifted priorities to become hyper-focused on reducing the risk of an outbreak at their six facilities.
Key Learning: Prior to the pandemic, Four Hands had not focused on infection control, but COVID-19 changed things, and Bridges believes infection control will continue to be a crucial component of health and safety plans for companies beyond the pandemic.
COVID provides an opening: increased focus on employee health
As Four Hands leadership began to develop their COVID response, they saw opportunity buried in all the uncertainty. The pandemic had provided a chance to shift the way they approached employee wellness. They could help employees become more aware of how they felt and recognize signals, like increases in their baseline temperature, that might indicate illness.
Eliminating a cumbersome process with a game-changing solution
“Wello has been life-changing for me and our team,” Bridges shared. “The process prior to implementing Wello was complex, to say the least.” When they first implemented temperature screening and a COVID-19 symptom questionnaire, they created an online form that employees were required to complete before arriving at work daily. Bridges’ team engaged a texting service to deliver reminders to staff members before the start of each shift at 4 a.m., 6 a.m., and 7 a.m. Each entry needed to be audited daily to ensure compliance and that the responses did not indicate possible exposure. Initially, Four Hands managers conducted temperature screening, but the national demand for thermometers made them difficult to purchase. So, they hired onsite nurses to conduct temperature screenings. But hiring nurses for each of their six facilities for both the day and night shift was extremely expensive at $25 per nurse per hour.
Before Wello, the process looked like this: Employees completed the COVID symptom questionnaire online, then they’d drive to a Four Hands location for drive-thru temperature screening and nurse clearance, often waiting in line to be screened. Once cleared by the nurse screener, the employee would drive to their facility to finally begin work. In addition, the HR team was now responsible for managing the entire operation and had to be prepared to adjust at a moment’s notice as nurses called in sick or had been exposed to the virus. “With the last-minute adjustments and long wait times for temperature screening, the process was very disruptive. It was manual, inefficient, and felt like money and time wasted,” said Bridges.
Something had to give.
The HR team partnered with their IT team to review several temperature-screening options. Many of the solutions on the market used technology that was not intended for temperature screening, so they lacked quality and accuracy and could not offer the flexibility needed to conduct health questionnaires. After rigorous research, they piloted the welloStationX.
Here’s why Four Hands chose Wello:
- Cost-effective. “The Wello stations paid for themselves within two weeks. In addition to that, my team was able to benefit the business in a bigger way beyond auditing health screening forms and nurse checklists,” shared Bridges.
- FDA cleared and reliable. The Wello stations were the only solution on the market with an FDA clearance. That meant the results were accurate and reliable in reaching the team’s end goal of keeping employees safe.
- Efficiency. Because the Wello stations were able to offer 3-second temperature screening combined with the COVID questionnaire, Four Hands was able to replace their lengthy, two-part screening process.
The Wello experience
The experience was like night and day. With Wello, the temperature screening process was seamless, efficient, and accurate. Employees arrive at work, walk up to the Wello station, complete the on-screen COVID questionnaire, and have their temperature taken in approximately three seconds. Employees with temperature readings within range receive a printed badge so that everyone in the facility knows each person has been screened. Even more, the HR team no longer needs to manually audit and review each questionnaire submission and track down nurses’ logs. The welloStationX provides privacy-conscious reporting and alerts that help the team to stay on top of potential threats.
Wello stations are now being used at each of the six Four Hands facilities. With employee experience being such a huge focus for Bridges and the rest of the leadership team, it was important for them to get employee feedback. In talking with employees, Bridges learned employees were grateful for the investments Four Hands made to keep them safe and to be able to start the workday smoothly. In a time of so much uncertainty, employees felt a semblance of peace of mind.
“We no longer have to ask our employees—many of whom use public transportation and carpooling to get to work—to make special arrangements for drive-thru temperature screening. All they need to do now is arrive and check-in at the Wello station. It’s a super quick, easy, and reliable process.”
-Candace Bridges
VP, Human Resources
Reduce your company’s risk of an infectious outbreak with Wello. Contact us to learn more.
