FIRE & ELECTRICAL SAFETY
“CHECK-IN SYSTEMS HAVE THE BENEFIT OF ALLOWING
USERS TO CONFORM WITH AN ORGANISATION’S INTERNAL
SAFETY GUIDELINES OR WIDER REGULATIONS.”
A FINE LINE Raymond Kenney¸ Managing Director at Track24 explores why it is necessary for
business to provide a duty of care to their employees in an emergency situation, and how they can best go about it.
LOCATION, LOCATION,
LOCATION Employees working in areas defined as being ‘danger by default’, such as oil rig or hostile conflict zones which have a higher than average chance of an emergency situation occurring, are likely to support the idea of sharing information about their location in order that they can receive support should a problem arise.
Tracking, one of the first solutions employed to ensure the safety of a business’s workforce operating in, or moving between such environments, is based on the automatic and continuous sharing of a person’s location, in real time, to a monitoring team.
Tracking technology has had a mixed reception, however, as employees working in a ‘safety by default’ environment, in which the possibility of an emergency is far less likely, will tend to put up resistance when a scheme like this is imposed by their employer. Instead, people based in these locations are more accustomed to using ‘manual’ check-ins; a location update system, driven by the users themselves to openly declare their personal safety. Compared to traditional tracking, check-in systems have the benefit of allowing users to conform with an organisation’s internal safety guidelines or wider regulations, such as ‘lone worker’ policies, while preserving the privacy of their location when required.
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STRIKING A BALANCE With a rise in emergencies such as terror attacks and natural disasters occurring in what were previously considered to be ‘safe’ environments, there is now an urgent need for IT directors to introduce emergency communication technology that will prepare their staff for such situations, and safely guide them through the action required should an emergency occur. However, if concerns over privacy result in a lack of trust by employees, adoption rates of these safety systems will be low, which will impact on the preparedness of staff.
Tracking and check-in systems, although effective in certain situations, aren’t always appropriate for large organisations that operate mainly in ‘safety by default’ areas but are still mindful of having a duty of care to their employees. What these organisations require is a more nuanced and purposeful approach, that strikes a balance between maintaining a duty of care while respecting the privacy of employees. Here, a system that utilises ‘location-based alerts’ (based on proximity) via unobtrusive mobile applications and that sends only time and geographically limited notifications to employees will not only meet the needs of a safety-conscious organisation but – crucially – also put an individual’s privacy first.
A SMART APPROACH
TO SAFETY Any system designed to alert staff to
a potential emergency should ideally make use of a smartphone’s general- purpose capabilities, essentially encouraging privacy by design. Systems designed using this principle would therefore include features including two-way multi-modal communications and notifications, guided user interactions, background network automation, location proximity, and precise location updates when required.
It’s encouraging, then, to see major UK brands deploying new ‘privacy- first’ safety technology across their workforce for a duty of care that, until now, they’ve been unable to guarantee. These systems are benign in nature; rather than monitor the productivity of employees, they’re designed instead to locate them in the event of an emergency and inform them of the danger they may be facing.
Should an emergency occur, organisations can draw a zone around its location on a map and use a system’s web application to find any members of staff who are in close proximity to the incident. Those staff members that have the mobile app on the smartphone will then automatically be identified and immediately warned of the situation. However, as the app will only share an employee’s location if they are within or close to an area of concern, the necessary balance is struck between privacy and duty of care.
www.track24.com www.tomorrowshs.com
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