Overview
Prominent assistance providers act proactively by contacting employees that could potentially be in need of aid, instead of only reacting to incoming emergency calls.
For example, they may contact employees who could be in an area of a high-risk incident that could affect them, such as civil unrest. Or it may be because of a potential future event that the employee is not yet aware of, such as an incoming tropical storm.
Challenge
When a disaster takes place or is about to take place, all companies ask themselves the following questions:
- Do we have any employees in the area?
- If so, are they OK?
- How do we ensure their safety?
Quickly answering the above questions can be more complicated than one might realize. Proactive emergency assistance needs to initiate assistance processes, no matter what time of day it is or where the event has occurred.
The time of day can be a large challenge companies face. Bigger companies often operate in multiple time zones. On top of that, many disasters happen outside of regular office hours, meaning these questions often need to be answered when management is offline.
Another challenge companies face is that many employees can be affected at the same time. This requires tools to coordinate and structure the process.
“Proactive emergency assistance needs to initiate assistance processes, no matter what time it is.”
Solution:
The best way to provide proactivity is to have a technical platform that automatically shows which employees are in the affected area and who their employers are. The risk information can also, in parallel, be automatically sent to the affected employees.
The Safeture platform provides a method of finding out who is OK or needs assistance by using a built-in mass-communication tool with integrated “Are you OK” response methods to find out if the employee is OK. This allows the assistance operator to focus on the employees who have responded that they need assistance or the ones that have not responded at all.
The Safeture platform increases the assistance provider’s quality and speed and proves the assistance provider’s competence by “being on top of things” towards the customers.
The Safeture platform will enable the emergency assistance provider to:
- Act quickly.
- Proactively reach out to potentially affected employees.
- Efficiently find out who needs assistance or cannot be reached.
- Provide employers with situation data and valuable reports as soon as possible.
Did you know that proactive emergency assistance for employees often follows the same procedure?
- Receive real-time alerts from an automated platform
- Automatically correlate real-time alerts with employee locations
- Reach out to all employees in the area to check if they are OK
- Focus on employees that are not OK or not responding
- Report to the management and await further instructions
A common underlying driver for establishing proactive emergency assistance is that company management wants to outsource or assign responsibility. Adding this proactive component proves both internally and externally how a company fulfills its responsibility towards the employees, even though it seldom results in anybody needing assistance. Therefore, this very generic process is often good enough.
More info on employee locations: The difficulty of automatically locating employees during a crisis.
