LONE WORKER PROTECTION THE SIX SAFETY STEPS
People who work alone can be more vulnerable to risks than office-based workers. Since the pandemic, millions more of us fit into the category of lone worker.
Which is why business leaders must develop mature strategies
for their remote employees, particularly when planning against unforeseen risks.
Today, if a critical event takes place, organisations need to be able to locate their lone workers and communicate with them to ensure their safety and productivity. They may be working from home, offsite at a client’s premises, in the field, or traveling. If their life or health is at risk, employers need to ensure their safety by putting in place ‘see something, say something’ programs, enabling panic buttons or making them aware of potential risks before they become a threat. And while worker safety is the priority, there are other benefits to the organisation in the way of ensuring the employee can still perform their functions.
A growing distributed workforce has put an additional burden on security and business continuity teams. Prior to the pandemic, most companies had a larger percentage of employees working from an office location. This has changed. Let’s say, for example, that a company has six office locations where most of their workers go and, at a given time, four workers are remote or traveling. Now imagine that there are 10 risk events happening at that time. Based on the location of those risk events, it generates one alert around an office location.
Now, however, instead of those workers primarily working from a company office, they might work remotely from a home office location. If those same 10 risk events take place, there are now five times the alerts generated because those events now are in proximity to four of the remote locations as well. At the same time, security and business continuity teams are not getting more resources to handle the workload, so technology is needed to meet the increased demand.
Let’s look at some of the ways that employers can keep their staff safe, wherever they are:
LOCATION AWARENESS Employees are not always in the same location each
day. Especially if they travel or work in the field or even rotate between a home office and a company office. This is sometimes referred to as ‘dynamic’ location. Having a system that can identify dynamic location significantly improves the ability to protect that
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Scott Morrison, Vice President Business Solutions at Everbridge, looks at some of the ways that employers can keep their lone worker employees safe, wherever they are.
employee. Dynamic location can be updated based on a travel itinerary, a meeting or shift schedule, a badge swipe into a facility, or even a proactive check-in via a mobile device to say, ‘I’m now here’.
THREAT AWARENESS Knowing the location of an employee is only half the
picture. Organisations and workers also need to be aware of threats based on where they are located. These could be things like civil unrest or planned protests, active assailants, severe weather, infrastructure failures, or hazardous accidents. Having real-time threat data that is location-aware is necessary for helping workers stay safe, as well as contextual data about what is around that event or worker, like the nearest hospital or police station or the nearest evacuation routes.
AUTOMATED CORRELATION Whilst location awareness and threat awareness are
important, there needs to be correlation between the two to identify when and where that threat may actually impact the employee. This is often a manual process for organisations and security teams, which means it takes time. This correlation needs to be automated because
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