As COVID-19 vaccine deployment and mass vaccination programs get underway, employers are at a new decision point: how to accelerate the “back to normal” without overstepping their bounds. Forrester says with 40% of European and 30% of US employees ready to return to the office employers need to prepare for an array of new privacy, ethical, legal, and compliance challenges as they plan to leverage vaccine and immunization passports to return employees to the workplace.
From doubts about vaccines’ effectiveness to significant country-by-country variation in administration priorities, employers need to be cautious as they define their pandemic management plans.
The Forrester report, The Opportunity, The Unknowns, And The Risks Of Vaccine Passports In The Workplace, identified several risks that employers must address if deploying vaccine passports — a digital document that provides evidence of an individual’s immunization status — to inform their return-to-work strategies.
Risk exposure includes sensitive data mishandling, discrimination, labour union mobilization, diminished cybersecurity, and negative impact on the customer experience.
Key takeaways
- Vaccines are not a silver bullet. Factors ranging from global vaccine strategies to early-stage understanding of the virus, its variants, and efficacy of the vaccine mean employers must plan to continue anywhere-work policies and hybrid experiences to balance convenience with well-being.
- Avoid the privacy and ethical pitfalls of a “no jab, no job” policy. Asking employees to carry proof of inoculation with them to enter the workplace introduces privacy and ethics risks.
- Follow principles of proportionality, fairness, and transparency. Employers should collect only the minimum amount of data needed to trigger specific policies. They should encrypt medical data and enforce strict access, sharing, and deletion policies to ensure fairness and protection.
- Employers must navigate compliance and legal risks. In the US, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said that employers can make the vaccine mandatory for employees, but several state legislatures have challenged the legality of such a requirement. In the EU and UK, each country has its own approach.
- Be mindful of customer experience and perceptions. Relaxing protocols for distancing, sanitization, and mask wearing in customer-facing interactions risks a negative impact on how customers perceive a brand and their willingness to do business with the organisation.
Forrester’s senior analyst Enza Iannopollo warns that just because COVID-19 is loosening its grip with the availability of vaccines does not mean it is going away.
“Vaccine passports don’t offer the silver-bullet solution that many might hope for easing pandemic protocols and restrictions, and businesses should be planning for life with COVID in the medium to long term. Our overarching message to organisations everywhere is one of caution."
"With the right planning and consideration, the return to work will be smoother and more successful for all involved,” she concluded.
