5 Reasons Why Your Travel Safety System Isn't Effective

A travel safety system is critically important for meeting your duty of care. However, gaining employee engagement with your solution can be a difficult task.

Here are 5 reasons why your travel safety system isn't effective:

1. Making Journey Management a cumbersome process

Nobody likes processes that take up time and energy for seemingly no positive end result.

Many companies either don’t know where their travelling employees are, which is a high risk approach, or they track their journeys using a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets can waste valuable productivity time as the traveller or an administrator has to manually enter data, it’s not only time consuming but what happens if one of your team members was involved in an incident, would the spreadsheet inform the executive team?

An alternative to spreadsheets are call centres however this can be another time consuming task when travelling, not to mention costly. The cost of the call centre plus the time taken out of the travellers schedule to find the number and make the call can become an expensive activity.

The health and safety of travelling employees is a high priority for most companies, especially those who actually care about their team. Journey management automation can be simple, affordable and proactive without being time intensive.

Wouldn’t you like to be alerted if one of your team was incapacitated?

Can you imagine not knowing a valuable team member required assistance?

2. Fatigue management is up to the employee

Fatigue management policies are typically manual guidelines that leave the onus on the employee. Companies can not afford for employees to disregard these policies. There’s the expense of lost productivity time but more importantly there’s the risk of losing the life of a valuable employee.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration conservatively estimates that 100,000 police-reported crashes are the direct result of fatigue each year. Road crashes cost the US $230.6 billion per year.  Fatigue management is crucial for the health and wellbeing of employees, after all having them home safely with their families is the ultimate goal.

Automating fatigue and journey management processes, can minimise risks to any organisation with a travelling or commuting workforce.

3. Safety Culture not a priority

It’s clear when organisations do not have safety as their number one priority. There’s lack of safety leadership, goals and safety expectations aren’t communicated, safety is viewed as a cost rather than an investment and proactively identifying and resolving problems before they occur is not a priority. If this sounds like your organisation, you can turn this around. Employing skilled HSE professionals or consultants can improve your safety culture whilst also improving incident statistics. Incidents can be costly so wouldn’t it be beneficial for your team to be actively participating in health and safety practices as a standard across the organisation? Saving a life is an investment for your team.

4. There is no guarantee alarms will be raised

Without proper journey management software in place, organisations are limited to tracking employee journeys manually. This is especially true in in the construction, mining, and trucking industries where job sites are isolated. When an emergency alert system is manual, it takes time for employees to quickly recognise if there is a problem. Further, the tediousness of manually managing journeys inevitably leads to the ignorance towards safety, after all how do you know when an incident occurs? Would it be easier if you were alerted of the situation?

5. Nobody can keep up with the amount of travelling I do

Granted that an Excel spreadsheet is effective for numerous functions, using a spreadsheet can quickly become quite complex particularly when 1000’s of entries have been entered. Other challenges can include spreadsheets being filed by users differently, often resulting in duplication and archived when it becomes data intense. The need to manually process data in the hope of identifying useful trends specific to the organisation can be extremely time consuming or worse, lost forever. Wouldn’t it be easier to view live data on a quick dashboard that highlights how many incidents your workforce has had?

Putting the safety of travelling employees must be a priority for any organisation. Do any of these reasons exist in your organisation? Recognise and address these immediately before it’s too late.