Every employer wants their employees to be able to work in the safest environment possible. It doesn’t matter if that work place is a building site or the accounts department on the fifteenth floor, providing a secure, healthy and safe space for employees to carry out their work is a priority.
In an office that's all relatively straight forward.
To get in and out you have security passes to check; you may have 24 hour video surveillance; and, in the event of a medical emergency, even staff trained in first aid ready to offer help until the emergency services arrive.
But for some employees the office is a place they visit only occasionally - if at all. Equally, with working from home becoming the norm, for at least part of the week, the secure and safe environment provided by the office simply isn't there to support them should something untoward happen.
The multiple cases of women going missing has also highlighted the need to ensure that all employees have access to a personal safety solution – not least when travelling to and from the office.
In all of these cases you need to be able to reassure your employees that their safety continues to be a priority. So just how can you achieve that?
Making every space a safe space
What’s required is a way to maintain an equivalent level of security and protection to that which an office environment provides. In the same way that help should be available in any office, its equivalent should be there to protect 24/7, and must be easily and quickly accessible to those who are outside that ‘safe space’ for whatever reason.
The good news is that such services are available right now.
Here at Peoplesafe, for example, our app allows employees, wherever they may be, to access trained and experienced professional help, and be linked directly and swiftly through to the relevant emergency services whatever the incident requires.
Whatever happens - no matter where your employee is based - at home or out on the road, visiting a client, or attending a meeting at a distant location - they have the full support they need should they fall seriously ill or need, for whatever reason, to access the emergency services.
But can’t they just dial 999? Yes, of course, they could. But what if they were in a situation where they can’t make that call? Because we know who they are, and can identify exactly where they are, it just takes the touch of a button to summon support.
Not only does a service like ours have the back up of trained, experienced incident managers on hand at our high-tech Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC) to answer and summon that help, but through our Unique Reference Numbers (URNs) which are held for every police constabulary in the UK, we have the ability to bypass the 999 system and contact emergency control rooms directly.
This saves valuable time and allows us to summon the support required immediately.
Reassurance - wherever they may be working
We sincerely hope that such an app as ours will never be required.
However, knowing it exists, and that it offers the highest level of support available, whatever the emergency, should not only reassure employers that they have provided the best possible back-up for their remote workers, but also give reassurance to those employees that they have a benefit which gives them the confidence that, in any eventuality, they can quickly summon up the help they need at the touch of a button.
And even more rapidly than they could by dialling the emergency services directly. That’s peace of mind for you, as their employer, and, wherever they find themselves, a weight off the mind of any employee when they are off site or working remotely.
To find out more about how you can protect your employees, wherever they may be based, call us now on 0800 990 3563 - or find out more about our services by clicking here.
Naz Dossa is CEO of Peoplesafe
