Health and safety is an integral component for any business managing a mobile workforce. 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 of the necessary tools and resources in place to complete a job, many now have to follow safety guidelines for COVID-19. The pandemic has added additional potential risks for field service workers who now need to factor in additional 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.
vWork helps you manage health and safety requirements
Health and Safety is an optional feature in vWork that helps our customers to effectively manage their health and safety requirements. The health and safety feature is fully customizable, allowing for custom risks, hazards and tags to be added and managed within vWork.
vWork accurately captures a workers location, which is useful when it comes to contract tracing. Workers can also be asked to acknowledge a customized 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.
So how does it work? Our health and safety feature has three components:
Hazards
Both workers and dispatchers can list any potential hazards, the hazard’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 all workers 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.
See Health & Safety Hazards in vWork
Tags
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 you always assign the best person for the job to meet all regulatory H&S requirements and keep your workforce safe.
See Health & Safety Tags: tag workers with their skills
Events
Health and safety events enable your 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. 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.
Notify the right people with alerts
Once events have been specified, any recorded events can be set to automatically trigger alerts to the right people within your business, including the option to share flexible reports and data. Everything is customizable to your unique business requirements
The end goal: using vWork's Health and Safety feature your business has the flexibility to incorporate changes in Health and Safety regulations and also easily adapt its H&S processes to ensure best practice employee welfare.
See What is Health & Safety in vWork