Ensuring health and safety for a mobile workforce

Soft ware as a service company vWork has designed a system to help businesses manage health and safety procedures for employees in the fi eld.

ENSURING A SAFE WORKING

environment is important for all businesses, yet certain industries face more challenges than others, especially when it comes to hazards and risks. On top of making sure field service workers have all the necessary tools and resources in place to complete a job, many must follow safety guidelines for COVID-19. The pandemic has added potential risks for workers who now need to factor in health measures such as social distancing, workspace disinfection and vaccination status.

With a requirement for health and safety practices to be adhered to on every single job, many businesses are implementing new processes and technologies to help facilitate health and safety on the job.

Sam Edmond, Digital Marketing Manager at software-as-a-service company vWork says Health and Safety is an optional feature that helps its customers effectively manage their health and safety requirements.

“The health and safety feature is fully customisable, allowing for custom risks, hazards and tags to be added and managed within vWork,” Edmond says.

“vWork accurately captures a worker’s location, which is useful when it comes to contact tracing. Workers can also be asked to acknowledge a customised hazard declaration that includes a statement that they have taken appropriate action to assess a potential risk and mitigate it. Workers can also be asked to attend a COVID-19 induction course before completing a job onsite. “

The health and safety feature has three components: hazards, tags and events. Workers and dispatchers can list any potential hazards, thehazard’s potential risk, and details about how it can be controlled.

Workers can be assigned responsibility for a hazard, and once they’ve taken the appropriate steps, vWork will show a ‘residual risk’ that remains after controls are accounted for.

Workers can also be prompted to acknowledge hazards before commencing work, ensuring they have a clear understanding of potential risks on a job.

Businesses that manage multiple hazards frequently can bulk upload them into vWork with the option to create steps that require hazards to be signed off before jobs can be completed.

Tags are a versatile vWork feature that enables workers to be ‘tagged’ with specific skills or qualifications. Jobs and Assets are also ‘tagged’ when they require skilled workers to complete them. vWork matches tagged workers to jobs to ensure the best person for the job is assigned to meet all regulatory requirements.

Organisations can also create a library of tags to apply to workers and jobs, to help represent the skills and qualifications required in the specific business or industry.

Health and safety events allow field workers to record accidents or incidents as they happen, directly from their phone.

“You have full flexibility to define what these events look like, they could be a non-injury accident or a comprehensive truck check,” Edmond says.

“You can alert your management team instantly, in real-time, to incidents in the field and make sure they have full information to mitigate further risk to your employees and others at the worksite.”

Once events have been specified, any recorded events can be set to automatically trigger alerts to the right people within the business, including the option to share flexible reports and data.

These alerts can come in the form of automated emails or text messages, and can be sent to dispatchers, customers, workers, or any other email address based on the job activity.

Edmond says alerts are a great way to improve communication and reduce administration. Everything is customisable to meet unique business requirements

“Using vWork’s Health and Safety feature, your business has the flexibility to incorporate changes in Health and Safety regulations and easily adapt its processes to ensure best practice employee welfare.”

Workers and dispatchers can list potential hazards, the hazard’s potential risk, and details about how it can be controlled.