Tag: smartlog

Smartlog® Turns 20: Celebrating Two Decades of Innovation!

Posted on by Melusi Chirikure
Modified
Original

Twenty years ago, the digital landscape was very different. Dial-up internet was king, mobile phones were mainly used for calls, and cloud computing was only a concept. Today, software is an integral part of our world, being a part of pretty much every aspect of our lives – including health and safety.

This year, we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Smartlog® by reflecting on its journey, growth, and future.

The Birth of Smartlog

Safesmart was incorporated in 2002 as a fire safety engineering company, and in 2004 we launched the cloud-based software Smartlog in order to give businesses more control in their fire safety management. Its ease-of-use was a key selling point, with an affordable pricing model also becoming a key attraction amidst an expensive market.

Milestones and Growth

Over the past two decades, the software has evolved, incorporating other areas of premises and compliance management into a digital platform. With each development building on the last, we have continually incorporated user feedback to adapt Smartlog to the ever-changing technological landscape – proudly passing the 300,000 active user mark earlier this year!

Impact on the Industry

The health and safety industry has seen a significant fall in both fatal and non-fatal workplace injuries over the last few decades, and this positive trend can be attributed to stricter legislation pushing businesses to put more efforts into protecting their workers.

We are very proud to be a part of this life-saving industry, having spent the last two decades facilitiating businesses with tools and knowledge which places workers’ safety and well-being first.

The Future of Smartlog

As we look ahead, we have some exciting developments in the pipeline which we cannot wait to share. Business risk compliance is a vast landscape of which health and safety is only one aspect; and we seek to ultimately provide our customers with a wider array of tools to make risk management as efficient and simplified as possible – whilst remaining affordable.

Celebrating 20 years of Smartlog is not just about looking back at what has been achieved, but it is also about recognising the potential for its future. As we mark this milestone, we remain committed to improving Smartlog further and providing crucial resources for businesses, ensuring that the next 20 years are even more innovative!

20% discount off the Training Course Creator

To mark this special occasion, we will be offering a 20% discount off our brand new Training Course Creator for the whole of November! To take advantage of this temporary offer, email: info@safesmart.co.uk or contact your Account Manager directly.

And of course, Smartlog wouldn’t have made it this far without the fantastic and loyal support we have received. So from all of us here at Safesmart, thank you for being a part of our journey!

iHasco eLearning now available in Smartlog®

Posted on by Melusi Chirikure

We are delighted to announce that we have partnered with eLearning specialists iHasco, and their extensive library of 200+ training courses are now available to purchase, assign and complete within Smartlog®.

Alongside Smartlog’s training course library and our recently released Training Course Creator, this new partnership with iHasco provides our clients with even more options for employee mandatory training.

Over 200 training courses

With video presenters, different language options and numerous interactive features, iHasco’s eLearning offers 200+ courses across the following main subjects:

Manage everything within Smartlog

From assigning training to tracking learners’ progress, all courses and credits can be managed within Smartlog. System alerts and email reminders are sent out exactly the same as regular Smartlog eLearning.

Additionally, all applicable course certifications and accreditations will be printed on users’ pass certificates, including:

  • CPD accreditation
  • Skills for Care
  • RoSPA
  • IIRSM approval

Wish to purchase course credits?

If you want to learn more about our new partnership, or wish to purchase course credits for your organisation, please contact your Smartlog Account Manager or email us on: info@safesmart.co.uk

How To Build An Online Training Course

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

Building an online training course can be a fantastic way to deliver training to your staff, allowing you to personalise and customise the learning experience, to ensure that all users take in all necessary information. However, that being said it is crucial to prepare properly before creating any eLearning course, to ensure that your courses deliver the required lessons. As often jumping straight into the creation phase, will result in missing content and ultimately a lower-quality course.

A user learning how to build an online training course

1. Course Objectives

Establishing what you want to teach is the first and the most crucial aspect of building an eLearning course. This ensures that the course covers all the crucial lessons that you need to teach, whilst allowing you to plan out how to best achieve this.

Start by setting the objectives of the course, these don’t have to be listed at the start of the course, but it can be helpful to establish to the learners what the key takeaways are. So what are the key lessons you are covering?

  • Filling in gaps of knowledge?
  • Teaching a user how to use something?
  • Where are health and safety measures required?
  • Site specific considerations/information?

2. Research

Research is the next important step in creating your own eLearning course. As before you start to piece together your course, you need to make sure that what you are teaching is correct. This will ensure that you fully understand the course content and iron out any mistakes/gaps in your knowledge to make sure that your training is as high quality as possible.

This step may not be necessary depending on the course content, so use your discretion. However, even if you are experienced in the subject at hand, finding credible sources to back up your statements only adds to the validity of your course, whilst ensuring that your learners can trust what they’re being taught.

A magnifying glass on a keyboard symbolising research

3. Audience and Format

When building your own online training course it provides an unmatched opportunity to tailor the content and format to your audience. This will also help condense the course, helping you to avoid being that dreaded training course that is too drawn out for its own good. So factoring in your audience and altering the content and format to suit, is key to avoiding this and build a high-quality condensed training course.

This will also allow you to change the format to best suit their training needs. For example, if your online training course is primarily for an experienced workforce, then you can tailor the content to be more ‘recap-focused’, to keep their training as concise and engaging as possible. However this therefore wouldn’t be as suitable for new starters, potentially lacking the detail required to fill in any gaps, highlighting why considering your course audience is crucial to ensuring that it delivers on the objectives.

A user learning from a elearning course

4. Course Outline

Once you have your foundations of the content, it is key to plan out an outline for your course. This will help you determine the best way to deliver the lessons to get your point across.

Start out by placing the key slides into your Training Course Creator tool and reorder them until they sit logically – covering all the key points in the order in which they should be covered. This will ensure that your course doesn’t bounce between topics to often and keeps the learning organised into digestible sections.

5. Content

Once you have your key slides in order, its now time to fill out the bulk of the course. This is where you compile all of the previous steps and complete the course with all of the relevant content.

Be sure to keep this in-line with your audience and formatted to suit, to create the best learning experience. Attaching any media, information sources and site-specific knowledge where necessary. This will also help keep the course engaging, which is critical to creating the best learning environment.

6. Quiz Questions and Types (Knowledge Checks)

With the bulk of the online training course now built, you can now test your learner’s knowledge. This is crucial to ensure that they have learnt the course content and meet the level of knowledge required to pass the course.

There are many ways in which questions can be integrated into the course, so make sure to consider the options to find the most appropriate fit. This means considering:

  • How many questions are needed?
  • How are the questions going to be spaced out?
    • Is one big block appropriate?
    • Do you space them out evenly?
    • Are short ‘Knowledge Checks’ the best fit?
  • What question types are you using?
    • Multiple choice
    • Drag and Drop
    • Sortable lists
  • What are the key topics to test for?
Puzzle question piece

7. Quality Checks

Finally, you need to check the quality of the course, ensuring that it works as intended, with no errors throughout the course, whether that is a weird glitch in the test questions or certificates not being awarded properly. This is also where you can refer back to the course objectives you set in the earlier steps, ensuring that the training delivers on its goals and has no content missing or being skimmed over.

During this step it is also important to check for any grammatical or spelling errors as well as formatting errors – are the pictures high quality? Are linked videos running smoothly? Is there any clipping or weird text placement?

Conclusion

Overall, there are many steps that go into the creation, research and formatting of an engaging high-quality training course. But these steps are crucial to ensuring the course lives up to the many benefits of custom courses and make it worth the added effort. When done correctly creating an eLearning course provides a unique learning opportunity and will enhance your training standard.

Introducing ‘Help Desk’ – our latest Smartlog® module

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

We are pleased to announce the release of a new Help Desk facility in Smartlog®.

The new help desk module allows your users to raise tickets regarding any premises issues in your
organisation. Live tickets can be tracked, updated and then resolved within Smartlog and through
immediate email notifications – including all related costs and time spent fixing the issue.

Help Desk provides you with the following abilities:

Create custom ticket categories
Any user can raise a ticket, and custom categories can be created. All created tickets are
automatically categorised and can be immediately assigned to the responsible user to resolve.

Set time-bound priority levels
You can set custom priority levels for your tickets, determining exactly the length of time the ticket requires to be resolved. This enables your SLAs with your contractors to be automatically built-in,
for example.

Keep a track of all costs
You can input and track all costs related to a ticket, and you can also track the exact time spent
resolving the ticket. Also, anyone working on the ticket can update it anytime with their detailed
costs.

Live email updates
From the raising of a ticket, during its resolution, and to its closing, email notifications are sent to
all users involved in the ticket to keep everyone updated on exactly what is going on.

This module is completely free to all our customers who use the full version of Smartlog. and is
immediately available for Company Admins to use.

To book a demo of ‘Help Desk’ for your organisation or to request more information about Smartlog, visit our contact page or send us your query to info@safesmart.co.uk

What is a Workplace Inspection?

Posted on by Charlie Patrick

A Workplace Inspection is the process of acutely examining the workplace to identify hazards and ensure that all health and safety standards are met. This then allows you to ensure that your workplace is safe and compliant and allows you to mitigate/eliminate the remaining risks.

Under the Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, every employer must make a suitable and sufficient assessment of both the risks to the health and safety of their employees that they encounter while at work, and the risks to the people not under employment.

What are the different types of inspections?

Workplace inspections can be either formal or informal, with the informal inspections being quick checks. There are four types of formal inspections, and they are:

  • Safety surveys – a general inspection of high-risk areas, activities, or processes
  • Safety Tours – a general inspection of the whole workplace
  • Safety Sampling – a systematic sampling approach of the high-risk areas, activities, or processes
  • Incident/accident inspections – After an incident has occurred (near miss, injury, or fatality) a full inspection of the cause and prevention. (this may need to be reported to the relevant health and safety authority)
Workplace Safety handbook with PPE surrounding

Who should complete the workplace inspection?

A formal inspection of the workplace should be carried out by multiple people ranging from health and safety specialists/committee members to supervisors/managers. This will often require you to bring in an external health and safety expert to ensure nothing is missed.

The HSE states that for formal inspections “Union-appointed health and safety representatives can inspect the workplace. They have to give reasonable notice in writing when they intend to carry out a formal inspection of the workplace, and have not inspected it in the previous three months”.

When do you need to complete a workplace inspection?

How often a workplace inspection is required depends on many variables, from the nature/risk of your workplace to significant changes occurring. But with no set timeframe it is up to discretion, here are some things to consider when deciding on the frequency of your regular inspections.

Workplace risk – the level of risk plays a huge role in how often an inspection is required with high-risk environments, such as a construction site, requiring frequent inspections when compared to an office for example.

Significant Changes – How often your workplace changes is also important when determining how often you need to carry out inspections, as significant change will deem your old inspection outdated and will need to be reviewed as soon as possible. Significant change can be anything from a large change in staff (both numbers and experience) to a change of building layout or premises completely or even a change in equipment/machinery.

Specialists’ opinion – Formal inspections require a health and safety specialist present, so you can contact your trusted specialist to recommend your next review/inspection window.

Worker on tablet/iPad completing workplace inspection.

How to complete a workplace inspection

Completing a workplace inspection depending on the environment can contain many different steps. For simpler workspaces, the responsible person will likely be able to use a risk assessment template to complete a sufficient assessment providing they have adequate health and safety experience.

However, for higher-risk or more complex workplaces, it is advised to bring in a health and safety specialist to ensure that your workplace inspections are completed to a high standard. This can then be further improved by assessing the workplace in a group to not miss out on any risks.

References

HSE (2023) ‘Inspections of the Workplace’. Available at: https://www.hse.gov.uk/involvement/inspections.htm (Accessed: 17/01/2024)

Legislation.Gov (2014) ‘Health and Safety at Work Act 1974’. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/37/section/2 (Accessed: 17/01/2024)

New eLearning course: Safeguarding & Prevent (Basic Awareness)

Posted on by Melusi Chirikure

We have now released a Safeguarding & Prevent (Basic Awareness) course on Smartlog® which is completely free for all current Smartlog customers to assign and use.

What is in the new course?

Schools and colleges have a legal obligation to safeguard and promote the welfare of children (anyone under the age of 18 years old) when carrying out their duties.

Safeguarding training is therefore a legal requirement and often a primary focus of agencies that inspect the standards of schools and colleges, e.g. Ofsted, Estyn, and Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI).

To add to our existing Safeguarding training course suite, we have now released a more condensed Safeguarding & Prevent (Basic Awareness) course, which is suitable and sufficient for any staff members who do not engage in ‘regulated activity’ with children as part of their duties.

For any employees carrying out regulated activities with a child or children, they can complete our standard Safeguarding & Prevent course.

Course Details
  • Course duration: 1 hour
  • Assessment questions
  • Certificate upon completion

Gloucester Rugby onboard Smartlog®

Posted on by Melusi Chirikure

Safesmart is pleased to announce two-time European Challenge Cup champions Gloucester Rugby as a Smartlog® client.

Competing in the Gallagher Premiership and four-time runners-up of the top division, Gloucester are also five-time Anglo-Welsh cup winners, and will be utilising the cloud-based health and safety software Smartlog to manage risk, compliance, training and safety processes among both personnel and premises.

Safesmart’s Managing Director Sam Secker said:

“We are extremely pleased to have an organisation of Gloucester Rugby’s stature onboard as a client, integrating Smartlog into their health and safety processes as well as tapping into our knowledge and expertise in this field.

We are positive this will be a great relationship going forward for the both of us.”

Gloucester Rugby kick off their 2023-24 season with a Premiership Rugby Cup match against Nottingham on 9 September at 3pm.

Lateral Flow Testing facility now available on Smartlog®

Posted on by Editor
  • Women’s hand uses a mobile phone application to scan QR codes in stores that accept digital payments without money and plastic tags on the table. QR code payment and cash technology concept

With the majority of schools and colleges in the UK returning to in-person learning on 8 March – and following many requests from school leaders and safety officials; we have now added the ability to record and report on COVID-19 lateral flow testing within Smartlog.

Similar to the Track and Trace facility that we added last September, the basic breakdown is the following:

  • A unique QR code (and link) is available to all organisations.
  • When the code is scanned (or the link is followed), the user is presented with a simple form to complete.
  • If a user enters a positive test result, the Admin will be sent an email notification.
  • Users do not have to be logged in to Smartlog to view and complete this form.

For current Smartlog 5 customers, the Lateral Flow Testing facility is accessible completely free of charge, along with unlimited access to our brand new Fire Risk Assessment Template, COVID-19 Track and Trace facility, and many other existing features.

To book a demo of the new facility for your organisation or to request more information about Smartlog, visit our contact page or send us your query to info@safesmart.co.uk

Our Christmas Operating Hours

Posted on by Editor

The Safesmart team would like to wish all our customers and their families a very Merry Christmas. After a difficult and challenging 2020, we hope that you all enjoy a happy new year.

For the Christmas holiday period, our office operating hours will be as following:

Closed from: Wednesday 23 December, 5.30 PM
Opening on: Monday 4 January, 9 AM.

During this period, our telephone number will be out-of-hours and all mailboxes will be monitored periodically.

We would once again like to thank our customers for their support during this challenging year.

Best wishes, 
The Safesmart Team

Contact Us

    01908 320 152

    08701 273 999

    info@safesmart.co.uk

    Get building this summer with 20% off our Training Course Creator this July, with code 'SUMMER20'

    Find Out More