Everything You Need From a Lone Worker Safety App

The evolution of workplace safety over the past decade has been significantly influenced by the continuous automation of traditionally manual procedures.

Modern, smart technology often provide an additional level of protection, whilst making processes more efficient, cost effective and convenient.

Technology makes reaction times quicker and is already contributing significantly to reducing workplace injuries and deaths.

Personal safety apps safeguard remote, lone, and isolated workers, provide effective communication and rapid emergency response capabilities, despite the lack of nearby supervision and support.

SafetyIQ's Advanced Lone Worker Safety App

Under most legislation, businesses have a duty of care to put measures in place to protect lone workers from risks, ensure effective communication and provide a means to get help if needed.

Safety technology can do more than make you compliant. SafetyIQ’s Suite of Safety Solutions makes compliancy easy and efficient, by automating processes and combining enhanced features in a single dashboard.

Think of it as a one stop shop for all your lone worker management needs.

But, what do you need from a lone worker management app?

Need for Identifying High Risks

Every industry, whether mining, construction, healthcare and so on, require a way to identify and assess hazards and risks in the workplace. Risk assessments, Take 5s and Safe Work Method Statements (SWMS) are just a few of the variations that help businesses reduce high risk working environments and meet their duty of care.

One of the biggest risks that separates lone workers from other workers is they have no one to turn to if they become injured, and there is no one nearby to check-up on them if they seem distracted, fatigued or generally not themselves.

30% of serious workplace accidents are directly related to fatigue, and workers who are fatigued are 70% more likely to be involved in an accident. With that in mind, a fatigued lone worker faces a higher likelihood of serious consequences.

SafetyIQ’s Suite of Safety Solutions combines these risk management forms and fatigue assessment technologies into a digitised solution with an automated review and approval process.

The assessments are tailored to your business requirements and saves companies thousands of hours spent on manually completing and reviewing these traditionally paper-based forms

Topdrill are saving over $9,000 and over 180 hours a month by switching to SafetyIQ and eliminating manual review and approval processes – read case study.

Digital risk assessments save about 85% of worker’s time – see the maths.

Ready for the Planned or Unplanned

Lone workers aren’t always privy to a 2-week roster and are often called out to jobs last minute. This means a lone worker app needs to have the flexibility to provide both planned and unplanned worker safety.

SafetyIQ’s new lone worker safety app Protect Me recognises the need for planned and unplanned work, with the ability to ensure safety for both requirements.

Protect Me allows lone workers to follow their rostered schedule with automated check-in reminders at predetermined times throughout their day.

Safety then becomes integrated into their everyday activities and management maintain communication and visibility of their lone workers.

On the other hand, if a lone worker hasn’t planned to undertake an activity or feels as though they might be in a risky situation, Protect Me can be activated immediately. This sends live location data to their team and notifies the right people if something goes wrong.

Emergency Response Capabilities

Unfortunately, accidents happen. When they do, would you prefer to hear about it hours or days later from an employee’s family?

Or when it’s happening so you can respond to it immediately?

Research in accident analysis and prevention has indicated that even a 10-minute reduction in emergency response time would decrease likelihood of fatality by 33%.

SafetyIQ’s Emergency Response features can be integrated with your internal processes or an external emergency response centre to ensure the right people are notified immediately with the right data to take action.

Giving you the chance to assess the emergency and respond quickly when every second counts. 

SafetyIQ's Emergency Escalation Process

The escalation process is activated if a check-in is overdue or an SOS button is activated, alerting selected team members to contact the worker and resolve any issues.

Integrations with GPS devices such as Garmin or Spot allow workers that operate in areas with no mobile connectivity, to Check-In or Activate an SOS button, feeding this data and alerts into Protect-Me. 

Auditable History Log

An important requirement of safety tools is the ability to review and audit a log of all the past events, drilling down by worker, date, time and location.

All data in SafetyIQ is captured in an automated audit log. This data is timestamped with pinned locations, notes and details of what happened. If an incident occurred, all the required information for reporting and insurance purposes are ready to go. 

One of our clients experienced a roll over on the way to a remote mine site, fortunately the driver was unharmed and found almost immediately by a passing driver. Unfortunately, the next steps in the event of an incident are reporting, investigating and the possibility of litigation.

As they were using SafetyIQ, all the required information was captured in the audit log. This was more than enough information for the investigators to rule out any negligence.

Integrated with Journey Management

The definition of a lone worker is ‘when work is done in a location where the employee can’t physically see or be seen by another person or talk to or be heard by another person’. This definition encompasses almost all drivers.

On top of this, 64% of all road fatalities in Australia are in rural and remote areas. As remote, lone and isolated workers are often required to travel out to geographically remote locations, how do you ensure their safety during this time?

Protect Me integrates with Journey Management to protect your workers throughout the entirety of their activities.

The Journey Management feature gives centralised visibility of mobile workers and automated emergency escalation processes.

For additional safety, vehicle telematics devices such as IVMS maintain the car’s live location in areas without mobile connectivity and can trigger the escalation process if it detects a vehicle impact or rollover.

The Takeaway

A lone worker solution should be much more than just a panic button. It’s an end-to end approach to creating a visible, protected and safety-conscious workforce, no matter where they are.

SafetyIQ’s new and improved lone worker app Protect Me is a critical feature in our suite of safety solutions. It provides incredible value to organisations and drastically improves lone worker safety.

Be more than compliant. Book a Demo today!