While health and safety considerations have always been vital, they have ultimately relied upon individuals in the field to recall and correctly implement them. But the consequences of a failure in health and safety have never been more acute, with new legislation tightening the law considerably should the worst happen and someone dies in the course of carrying out their work.

The arrival of ever more versatile mobile communications technology has changed what it means to address health and safety for the field worker. It’s a trend which is delivering some groundbreaking work for employee wellbeing. From vehicle and on-site safety to risk assessment and personal protection, businesses with field workers have a variety of important considerations to keep on their agenda.

There has been considerable emphasis on HGV safety for a number of years, but now vehicle safety across the board is coming sharply into focus, in large part due to the Corporate Manslaughter Bill. Organisations supplying vehicles for their mobile workers need to make sure that they are road worthy – the onus lies squarely with the employer to make sure issues as fundamental as tyre pressures are correctly monitored and controlled.

The employer Duty of Care also extends to what is referred to as the ‘grey fleet’, where employees opt out of the company car scheme and use their own vehicle for daily work tasks. It’s just as important that these vehicles are assessed, monitored and kept safe.

Yet it’s utterly impractical to bring each vehicle to a central location for an expert check on every occasion it’s needed. The answer over the years has been to require drivers to carry out the safety checks and generally this has involved walking round the vehicle and filling out a form on paper, which they hand in later.

Providing drivers with the ability to assess and note faults via a PDA which transmits the information back to HQ in real time maintains the process, ensures it happens and allows repair or servicing work to be scheduled as soon as required.  While many employers might have thought about the correct process, having the correct process in place is only part of the solution. Making sure these processes are enacted is just as vital.

Getting mobile workers to their destinations safely takes care of part of the day – once they are on site or at their place of work, different considerations come into play. It’s common for the working day to begin with a formal run-through of safety procedures and risk assessments, where the senior person on site reminds his or her colleagues of the health and safety rules.

This has been a requirement for many years, so while the objective remains the same, using a mobility solution now guides the workflow, and can audit its completion by recording answers via the handheld device by each worker on site. These questions have to be answered before work can commence for the day thus ensuring risk assessment compliance.

With the answers to the safety questions passed back to HQ in real time, there is an audit trail for companies to demonstrate to themselves and customers that procedures are operating to a high standard. It also enables continual assessment of the procedural knowledge of each worker – if training is required, the content can be precisely identified.

Of critical importance is the extent to which this process can be imposed. It can easily be made mandatory, with a workflow that has to be followed – and even electronically signed off – by the user to show that it has been completed.

For the large numbers of lone workers out there, mobility technology is offering a safety net for workers while they are out in the field on their own. In some quarters, the Duty of Care in relation to lone workers begins and ends with vehicle tracking. The theory is that by tracking the vehicle with a ‘black box’ device, you track the worker inside it. This works well until the worker leaves their vehicle – at this point, ‘black box’ vehicle tracking reaches its limits, arguably just when the worker is starting what could be the most hazardous part of their working day.

Central to the concept of constant lone worker protection is the use of GPS technology to track the location of field workers from a handheld device which they carry with them constantly. Yet, enabling greater levels of personal safety is not an isolated goal – location-based information allows users to provide customers with more accurate information about the service levels and estimates for when work will take place.  Modern mobility solutions can easily integrate with central IT systems and business processes to give businesses the opportunity to become more efficient – in simple terms, they just have a much better view of what their business is doing at any particular time.

In dealing with personal safety, the monitoring process is simple and takes little effort, but failure on the part of the lone worker to report their status within a set amount of time leads to an escalation in efforts to contact them. Integrating this kind of communication with GPS technology is being adopted by a wide range of organisations, so as well as being able to navigate easily between jobs, lone workers are safe in the knowledge that they can be located should they take another option open to them and trigger a safety alarm. Ultimately, adopting an approach to lone worker protection which focuses on the worker, as opposed to their vehicle, is the only way to fully address employer Duty of Care.

In the broader sense, a holistic approach to providing duty of care for field workers needs to emphasise both risk assessment and location tracking as a standard for forward thinking businesses to meet. 

Corporate Manslaughter – the law is changing

The Corporate Manslaughter Bill will have implications for every kind of business, but for those with diverse health and safety responsibilities such as companies with a mobile workforce, it's impact has the potential to be far reaching.

The new law will make it much easier for an organisation to be found guilty of manslaughter and it will be sufficient to show that the death was the result of gross failings of senior management. The victim must be someone to whom the company owed a duty of care (employees, sub-contractors, certain customers, etc), and the offence can be punishable by an unlimited fine and orders for remedial action and publication.