Monitoring and Managing the Compliance of Lone Worker Safety Solutions

Compliance is an interesting area when it comes to lone worker safety solutions. Generally, organisations have robust and evolved risk assessment processes. When it comes to lone working and staff safety, one key output to mitigate the identified risks is through investing in and adopting lone worker safety solutions such as Reliance Protect. Furthermore, organisations often have well defined lone working policies and procedures, and update these to include the usage of lone worker safety solutions.

The one area that tends to receive the least focus in this risk management process is monitoring and managing the compliance of staff using such solutions, against the policies and procedures put in place. Integral to this is the difficulty in the influencing of behavioural safety in getting users to use the safety devices as planned.

Effective compliance monitoring practices can be trickier for many managers due to time, effort and the 101 things that cross their desk each day. The main objective is to define if the device is being used effectively or ineffectively in real time, then to put in measures in place to mitigate any consequence of poor usage that compromises the purpose of having the device in first instance.

The key fundamental issue here is if an organisation does not measure and monitor compliance, how can it demonstrate it is managing the risks?

We are passionate about the usage of our solutions, and hence compliance. We want to help and support every Reliance Protect customer maximise their usage of our solutions and hence maximise their value for money, both from an employer and employee perspective. As such, we believe our customers for many years have led the way in day to day usage rates of such solutions.

Partnership Approach

We help customers define and manage compliance through a number of initiatives. Firstly we have dedicated and experienced field based customer account support staff who can help customers integrate our solutions into their policies and procedures, sharing best practice. We can advise and set benchmarks for usage for any given department or team. We can work on proactive initiatives during the initial roll out such as delivering training to managers to help them effectively manage their teams usage. We also want to work with customers through the length of their Reliance Protect contract to ensure those strong early usage levels are maintained and do not tail off over time.

Training Is Not Just For Device Users

Access to quality training both at the outset and ongoing through the contract is important. We have a range of quality courses that can be delivered face to face, via web conferencing and elearning. Since the launch of our latest elearning platform in 2017, we have over 27,000 users. Our dedicated full-time trainers deliver training to hundreds of users and managers at our customer premises, month in month out. Empowering managers and team leaders is crucial to getting user engagement.

Access Real Time Data Quickly

A key part of monitoring and managing usage is via the management information we generate. We have always sent reports out to customers detailing trends, summaries and granular level usage data. Key to this going forwards is the new management information tool within our Focus online customer portal. We have invested heavily over the last 6 months to expand the level of information customers can access. A broad range of reports can be accessed at any time, utilising real time data, displayed in tables, charts and graphs. They can be selected by date range, teams and departments, individual users, by device type and by specific usage metrics. The reports can also be exported in a number of formats such as Excel and PDF.

To minimise time taken to generate these reports, any key reports of importance and value can be automatically scheduled to be delivered at a frequency of choice eg monthly to specified recipients. The management information accessible in Focus allows customers to quickly and easily monitor and manage the usage metrics they have prioritised, to enable them to effectively manage compliance. We are currently rolling out the new management information tool to all of our existing customers.

The Results

We closely monitor activity levels across our customer base. Even in the last 12 months, across our entire estate we have seen usage rates increase by 14% on average per device. This statistic refers to the levels of Amber Alerts we receive. Our users generate over 10,000 Amber Alerts every day – that’s 1 every 9 seconds. The Amber Alert is a crucial metric that we and most of our customers track. This feature is a proactive feature users perform throughout the working day to provide updates on our system on their location, tasks performed, and risks identified – it’s users performing dynamic risk assessments.

Through our extensive customer surveys, we know that 76% of our users feel safer and more valued by their employer as a result of adopting our solutions.

Engaged staff, utilising our solutions as part of their daily routines, and feeling safer and more valued, is what drives us.

If your organisation utilises lone worker safety solutions and compliance rates are low, put us to the test! Get in touch via protectsales@reliancehightech.co.uk or 01977 696649 to speak to one of us today.