Collecting employees' vaccination status with Sora

Many companies and employees are looking forward to getting back into the office and working in person. And that means, whether the result of the US federal mandate or internal company policy, companies need to collect vaccination status from their employees.

Here’s how you can collect employees’ vaccination status in Sora using a quick, simple workflow.

It will send a survey to employees and allow them to answer questions about their vaccination status and upload pictures of their vaccination card.

Then it will create three follow-up tasks based on their responses.

Create the workflow

To start, we create a new workflow by navigating to the Workflows page and clicking on the Add new workflow button.

And then we give it a name, like Employee Vaccination Status.

Collecting vaccination status

Then we add a survey task and call it Vaccination status survey. So we click the Add new task button, name the task, and select survey from the drop-down. Then we click Expand to see all the task options.

Now we need to add our survey questions and response types, so we expand the Survey Questions section.

The questions you’ll add to the survey will all depend on your company’s vaccination policy. If your company is requiring all employees to be vaccinated or have an approved medical or religious accommodation, the survey could be just a couple of questions. If your company is allowing unvaccinated employees to opt into regular testing, you might need to collect more information or even send a follow-up survey.

In our example, we’re going to have four questions: 

■  asking the employee’s vaccination status
■  collecting a picture of the employee’s vaccination card
■  if necessary, collecting a picture of the back of the employee’s vaccination card
■  and asking whether an employee will be visiting an office or attending an in-person event

The first question will be Are you fully vaccinated against COVID-19?

The response type should be Multiple choice, with these three options:

■  Yes
■  No, I have a religious or medical accommodation
■  No

And the question should be marked as required, so an employee cannot submit the survey without answering this question.

The next two questions will be to collect digital proof of vaccination. One for the front of the card and one for the back. Both will have image response types so that employees can upload a picture.

The question for the first will be If yes, please upload a picture of the front of your vaccination card.

And the second will be If yes, please upload a picture of the back of your vaccination card.

And finally, we want to ask Are you planning on visiting an office or attending an in-person company event? 

This way we can verify that everyone who is planning to be in the office is vaccinated.

And we want to make sure that this question is required.

Then we hit the Create (Publish) button.

And we have a one-task workflow that will send a survey to every employee when they are enrolled in it.

And that could be it for your workflow. Nice and simple.

But you might want to have some more tasks based on the responses of the survey. We’re going to create three task templates based on the responses to the survey questions.

The first task will be to verify the vaccination cards for all those who answered “yes”. It’ll be a survey task to get approval that the collected vaccination card is submitted and verified.

The second task will be to verify those who say they have an accommodation.

And the final task will flag any employee who says they are not vaccinated but plan to return to the office.

Verifying vaccination cards

When you hover over the survey task, you’ll see a plus sign, click it to add a dependent task.

Name the task Verify vaccination card, under Task type select Survey, then click Expand.

Under Survey Questions we need just one question, which we’ll just call Vaccination cards verified. And since the response is Yes/No, we’ll select the response type Boolean. Then we’ll click the three dots to add a short question description.

You’ll see under Assignee that by default the task is assigned to the employee going through the workflow. But we want to change that because we want to assign it to a specific member of our team who will be verifying vaccination cards. So from the drop-down, we select A specific employee and then select the employee we want the survey to be assigned to.

And now under Task instructions you’ll want to include the photos of the vaccination cards from the survey response, the person who needs to verify them can see them right in the task. 

To reference text data from the employee profile of the employee going through the workflow, just type curly bracket twice – {{ – and select the data from the drop-down.

But to include images, just click the image icon, under Image source select Sora image field, and then from the drop down select the image survey question.

And since we don’t want to shrink the image, we’ll toggle on the Full width option.

We’ll do that for both images and we have our task instructions.

And we’re going to uncheck the Require all variables to have values before sending this survey. That way, if the employee doesn’t include both images the survey task will still be created, but the employee verifying the cards will be able to see that they weren’t included and mark the survey as not verified.

Then, finally, we want to create a filter so that the survey is only created for those who answer that they are fully vaccinated.

To do that we expand the Filters section and click the Add multiple choice filter button.

Now from the drop-down we’ll select the “Are you fully vaccinated against COVID-19?” question.

Then from the drop-down under that question we’ll select the response that we want to filter on, which is “Yes”.

Then we click the Create (Publish) button.

Verifying vaccination accommodation

Now we’re going to create another dependent task off of the initial survey task. We’ll name it Verify vaccination accommodation and under Task type select Survey assignment.

Again we’ll add an approval survey question with the Boolean response type and change the Assignee to a specific member of our team who will be verifying each accommodation.

Then we expand the Task instruction section to again write in any information that will help the assignee complete the task.

 And then we want to set up the filters on this task so that it’s only assigned for employees who respond to the survey question saying they have an accommodation.

To do that we expand the Filters section and click the Add multiple choice filter button.

Now from the drop-down we’ll select the “Are you fully vaccinated against COVID-19?” question.

Then from the drop-down under that question we’ll select the response that we want to filter on, which is “No, I have a religious or medical accommodation”.

Then we click the Create (Publish) button.

Following up with unvaccinated employees

And for our final task, we repeat the sets above, creating another dependent task, naming it Vaccination status follow-up. This will be a task created only for people who said they are not fully vaccinated and plan on returning to the office or attending an in-person work event.

Again, you’ll want to assign this task to a specific person on your team who will be following up with these employees. And you’ll want to write Task instructions that include the employee’s name and any other information they need to conduct the follow-up.

But this time under Filters you’ll want to create two multiple choice filters.

The first filter will be on the “Are you fully vaccinated against COVID-19?” question for those who selected “No”.

And the second filter will be on the “Are you planning on visiting an office or attending an in-person company event?”  question for those who selected “Yes”.

Then we click the Create (Publish) button.

Now we have a quick and easy way to collect employee vaccination status and follow up on replies with tasks assigned depending on responses.

Setting permissions

But we still have one very important thing left to do. These responses are personal employee information and we need to make sure that they are only viewable to those who need to see them.

To do that we navigate to Settings and select the Permission tab.

For this workflow, we want to store these responses completely separately from the rest of the employee profile, so we will create its very permissions with its own group of employees who have the specific permissions to view this information.

So add a new employee group, name it Vaccination verification, and add only the employees who should have access to the information.

Now under the Employees section of the page, expand the View and manage employee data subsection.

Then scroll to find the Vaccination status survey and update the permissions so that just the employees in the Vaccination verification group have View, Export, and Overwrite permissions.

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Now your workflow is ready and you can begin adding employees to the workflow.

It’s even worth considering allowing employees to self-enroll in the workflow so that, if they were unvaccinated but then get their vaccination, they can re-enroll themselves in the workflow to update their survey responses.