Over the last two years, businesses across numerous industries have witnessed a 44% rise in remote work culture that is enduring into the post pandemic world. As work environments become more fluid, it’s crucial for organisations to ensure the safety of their staff as part of their duty of care provision. Deploying a sound digital safety solution is the first step any organisation should be taking.

Not every staff safety solution is alike, and each organisation will have different needs and provisions to fill; however, there are five key functionalities any effective digital safety solution should have:

• Live Location Sharing

Any organisation that supports staff in the field or lone workers should be implementing a location sharing system that offers real-time updates and user-led location sharing. While any safety solution should include a reliable location sharing system, it’s important to ensure that privacy and data protection are fully considered. Any worthwhile digital safety platform should have these built into the structure of their system.

Finding the right solution enables staff to feel a sense of safety when travelling in unknown locations or when based for work in higher risk environments, but without sacrificing their right to privacy.

• Journey Logging

Organising business travel solutions and handling the logistics of a work trip can be daunting, especially when coordinating trips to new areas of opportunity or places of higher risk. Organising and keeping precise records of staff journeys requires a high level of travel management and logistic support – a feature any worthwhile digital safety solution should also include.

With features such as journey management, staff members can keep their colleagues informed of their planned destination, expected times of arrival, and planned and taken routes. By eliminating logistical confusions and unnecessary communication, safety platforms can streamline travel management by simply logging and sending any and all business related trips straight to an organisation in real time. So no more excel spreadsheets, no more inaccurate miles, and no more manual solutions.

• User Consent

As mentioned, user consent and privacy should be key to any digital staff safety solution. Staff should not only be confident that their privacy and personal data are properly protected, but they should also not feel as if they are being micromanaged.

Some safety and logistics solutions are notorious for indiscriminately tracking user movements, online activity, and ‘clicks’. Any organisation looking to implement a digital safety solution should take care to first and foremost meet the needs and expectations of their staff. In many ways, this means finding a solution that not demands, but encourages, active staff participation.

• Mass Communication

International mobile data coverage has never been more comprehensive, and thanks to smartphone culture, virtually every individual or organisation uses this technology. Leveraging these readily available technologies into a safety solution has been more common in recent years; however, most solutions tend to be organised rigidly and hierarchically.

Any valid digital safety solution should deliver some form of mass communication functionality; however, only the worthwhile solutions will take communication channels to the next level. Paired with the top-down approach, it’s becoming more common to implement bottom-up communication channels within an organisation’s safety solution. Opening up communication channels from both ends promotes wider information contribution, increases the value of information shared, and limits potential risks from poorly thought out organisation.

• Incident Reporting & Management

In today’s world we are privy to an overwhelming amount of information being streamed to us; however, picking out the important information from the irrelevant requires a dedicated and delicate process. Safety platforms are increasingly implementing incident reporting and data management into their systems, offering technology-driven solutions to record and store information as it is made available.

A worthwhile safety solution always takes these functionalities a step beyond, and offers a constructive improvement to the ordinary safety and communication channels most organisations utilise. Whether your staff are operating locally, abroad, within a larger workforce, or alone it is vital to keep them informed and up to date about developing situations both internal to their organisation and external within their operational environment – your worthwhile safety solution will facilitate this in real time.

The Take Away

Any digital staff safety solution needs to be reliable and secure; however, most organisation’s operational needs will not be met by off-the-shelf solutions available on the market. As businesses and people become more fluid and dispersed, and as the corners of the world continue to shrink, organisations need to expand upon and improve their digital safety solutions.

Innovative and technology-driven safety platforms will be a staple of the enduring post-covid work environment. Any worthwhile digital safety solution will have implemented these five key functionalities, making them fundamentally risk averse while being well-tailored to suit any organisation’s needs – ensuring that these systems will be able to weather any safety, operational, or logistical challenge thrown its way for years to come.