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How do I increase the safety of my mobile workers?

Written by MyMobileWorkers

The first thing any parent will do to protect the safety of a young child, is to keep them close - to keep a keen eye on what they’re up to. What they don’t want is for them to start wandering off. And that’s why ensuring the safety of mobile workers is such a tough challenge.

As a manager, keeping an eye on your workers is hard when they’re scattered out across the map.

The other factor is that many mobile workers work alone, increasing the dangers they face from accidents, hazardous environments and potential violent incidents.

A hard hat is one of the more obvious ways to increase the safety of mobile workers

Despite continued improvements to UK worker safety over the past decade, the figures still make for grim reading. In 2014/2016 there were 142 fatalities and more than 600,000 work related injuries.

How to increase the safety of mobile workers:

  1. Know worker safety laws
  2. Assess the dangers
  3. Make a plan
  4. Get the right tools

Know worker safety laws

The first step is to understand what your health and safety responsibilities are as an employer, as well as what you should expect from your mobile workforce. The laws affecting your organisation will depend on the type of industry but the main regulations are:

  • Health and Safety at Work Act 1974
  • Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999
  • Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995
  • Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992

It can seem daunting at first, but there are plenty of online resources to help guide you through what the requirements are. You can find an overview here and the HSE guide here.

Assess the dangers

Once you have a grasp of what’s required, you can start to review the potential hazards that are affecting the safety of mobile workers. This should be a collaborative process - the people best placed to identify risk will usually be the mobile workers themselves.

You need to identify any significant risks and take all ‘reasonably practicable’ steps to protect your workers from them - whether it’s training, use of protective clothing, restrictions on working hours etc.

 

Make a plan

Once you know what’s legally required and you know the specific areas of risk in your organisation - you’re ready to create a health and safety plan. A written policy document is a legal requirement for any company with five employees or more.

It doesn’t have to be complex or overly detailed but it should set out exactly who does what, when and how. It should also make clear what’s expected of employees and what training or equipment they require to carry out particular tasks.

You can find HSE guidance on creating a policy here.

Get the right tools

Technology has unlocked powerful new ways to manage and monitor mobile workers. This has provided a number of essential tools when it comes to improving health and safety standards.

One area in particular is the use of mobile workforce management software to track, in real-time, the movement and status of each employee. It helps solve the problem of trying to manage the safety of fieldworkers when you don’t know where they are or what they’re doing.

Heighten the safety of mobile workers

A system such as MyMobileWorkers also allows you to integrate company safety policy into the employees’ daily workflow via an app, ensuring the safety of mobile workers. This delivers safety guidance and checks on-screen, as well as creating a digital log of your safety processes.

If you are wanting to increase the safety of your mobile workers, whilst also having all the other features digital software can offer, here are the top five tips for moving to digital management software. 

field worker safety

Full image credit: FreeImages.com/Lotus Head

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