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
Training is a crucial part of any business’s health and safety, with it being critical to ensuring that everyone knows the dos and don’ts within their workplace – everything from Asbestos Awareness to Fire Safety courses. However, managing training can often be a time-consuming and stressful task, and businesses often don’t take the time to consider other options. So here are the 5 benefits of eLearning to help you streamline your training and widen your perspective.
Flexible Learning
One of the advantages of eLearning is its flexibility in both location and timing. Gone are the days of trying to schedule training with everyone’s calendars to make sure they can all attend one session at a set location.
eLearning allows you to bypass this and get your staff to learn at a time which suits them. Whether that’s on their phone/tablet as they are on the go or in the office on their computer, online training is completely flexible, all you need is a device and internet access.
Seamless Management
Managing training can be challenging and time intensive, lining up schedules, organising the training and tracking who has done what and when. But eLearning can streamline this process, with fast insights into your organisation’s training.
With the ability to quickly view who has completed their courses and what’s overdue and upcoming, our eLearning module will also ensure that no training is missed. With weekly email reminders for overdue training and auto-assign features, you can ensure that your training doesn’t go past its expiry date.
Personalised Learning
Another great benefit of eLearning comes from the individual aspects of it, allowing for personalised and unique learning. From choosing what to assign to everybody individually to tailoring their courses specifically to their department/site using a Training Course Creator tool.
Being digital, eLearning also provides a unique learning opportunity, allowing you to use videos and graphics easily to learn and even interactive content, which can provide immediate feedback to the user, helping them learn faster.
Reduced Costs
In-Person training is expensive with many factors affecting the price, from the trainers’ day rate, the travel costs involved, time lost and even the building costs for the room.
However, due to the nature of online training, you can cut these costs down by going digital, having no travel or hire costs and having training for unlimited users all for one price. Making eLearning a lot more affordable for businesses especially when the change in admin work is accounted for.
Bite-sized Learning
Splitting up training time is crucial to remain focussed and ensure the best learning environment. This is especially important when you are covering serious topics as is normally found within workplace training.
This benefits eLearning greatly as you can easily split up your training into bite-sized chunks, either one course at a time or pausing halfway through to come back to it later.
Overall considering the swap to eLearning can be beneficial for most businesses, helping you to streamline your training process whilst reducing costs, removing the hassle, and improving your staff’s learning experience.
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.
Every year, over half a million accidents occur in the UK workplace, which leads to around 60 million lost workdays through injury. From freak occurrences to oversights in safety, these injuries often occur for a range of reasons.
As the responsible person you have a legal requirement to identify and minimise the risks, and a common way to do this is through a Risk Assessment.
The law states that employers must make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the safety risks to their employees that they may encounter whilst at work. If you are an organisation with 5 or more employees, this is then required to be recorded – both detailing the findings and any employees that may be at an increased risk.
A risk assessment covers this legislation, as carrying one out involves finding the potential hazards and introducing control measures to minimise the risks, which in turn will ensure a safe workplace.
So, who can complete risk assessments?
Anyone who is deemed ‘competent’ can complete a risk assessment. According to the HSE, this is deemed as having the “relevant skills, experience, and knowledge to manage health and safety”.
Inspection
The first step towards increasing safety is to identify any potential risks: Take a walk around your workplace whilst being mindful of any potential hazards, regardless of the severity.
Make sure to take into account any changes that may happen, as workplaces are often busy and changing, so make sure to try this at different times of the day and week, to see if any other issues present themselves.
These changes could affect the overall safety of your business, so it is important to check often to keep everyone safe.
After all, a business environment can be completely different from one day to the next and this should be factored into your overall assessment. To avoid missing common risks that are often forgotten, we would suggest that you use a risk assessment template.
Communication
As well as conducting inspections, it is imperative that you communicate with all employees.
Your employees are working within your business every day and likely encounter a range of risks daily, therefore developing an in-depth understanding of the risks involved, so make sure to ask them!
They will be able to offer a different perspective on the issues faced, as well as being able to point out anything you may have missed.
This can be valuable feedback to help you keep them safe and feel heard.
It can also be useful to reach out to external organisations for advice. If you have any machinery or equipment within your workplace, it may be a useful idea to contact the manufacturers or check the manuals for guidance.
You can also get in touch with occupational safety organisations for more generalised guidance.
Expectation
When identifying the risks in your organisation, you need to be thorough and not just look for expected hazards. You need to be considerate of unexpected events which could occur, and these can include anything from faulty equipment to something coming loose and falling, for example.
By looking beyond the expected hazards, it allows you to plan for the unexpected – just in case. This will, therefore safeguard everyone that might enter the working environment – both employees and the general public.
Although commonplace, you might forget to think about employees who work outside of regular hours, such as cleaners or maintenance staff. This highlights the importance of considering all aspects of the working day, so make sure to take everyone into account.
Long Term
Long-term risks can often be overlooked during inspections, but it is important to take them into consideration. This is particularly important for environments with unique conditions such as a high level of noise or the use of chemicals.
Although most long-term risks may not appear dangerous at first, they have the potential to cause lasting damage to employees who deal with them regularly.
Due to them being less prominent, long-term risks can often require more research. For example, if you are unsure about a specific hazard (such as sound levels for example), it might be useful to read up on it or contact an organisation who are more knowledgeable in that area.
Analysis
Analysis of the illness and accident records can be a great tool to help you to identify safety risks. They can highlight patterns in ill health, which in turn will aid you in finding the root causes.
Patterns may include anything from location, use of machinery, time of day or even training level.
These real-world examples can often be very informative of the working environment, therefore are key for helping you to prevent future ill health due to a recurring risk.
Personalisation
Risk assessments are ultimately about protecting people, and this should be kept in mind when looking for hazards.
Extra consideration should be given to vulnerable people, including older, younger, people with disabilities, pregnant women and new mothers.
Consideration should also be given to employees with little or no training who may not be fully acclimatised to your business yet.
Conclusion
To recap: risk assessments are a legal requirement for employers to ensure the safety of everyone in their workplace. It is important they are completed by a competent person to a high standard, taking into account all potential risks both long and short-term.
This should be done whilst also considering the changes in the workplace during the day and any vulnerable people who may require extra attention to ensure their safety.
Analysing past incidents and speaking to employees will help improve the quality of the risk assessments you complete, as this will assist you in finding any overlooked hazards and also provide a different perspective on issues.
We are very pleased to announce the release of a Medical Tracking facility in Smartlog®.
This module is a secure facility for dedicated medication management – from tracking dosages to automatically notifying carers, parents or guardians when a medication is due to expire or has expired.
Medical Tracker provides your organisation with the following abilities:
People Management
Keep track of all treatments & dosages administered to an individual, and securely maintain their user profile to make sure medication is always up to date.
Add multiple contacts to each profile, who can be automatically alerted when medication is due to expire.
Medication Management
Keep track of the different medications in your premises – filter by exact location, and make sure all required supplies are always fully stocked.
One button importing – effortlessly transfer data from your current system or a spreadsheet into Smartlog.
Treatment Management
Keep track of all treatments & dosages administered to an individual, and securely maintain their user profile to make sure medication is always up to date.
Add multiple contacts to each profile, who can be automatically alerted when medication is due to expire.
This new module is completely free for all our customers who use the full version of Smartlog, and is immediately available for Company Admins to use.
To book a demo of ‘Medical Tracking’ for your organisation or to request more information about Smartlog, visit our contact page or send us your query to info@safesmart.co.uk
After months of hard work by our Professional Services and Smartlog Development team, we are pleased and excited to announce that we are launching our new fire risk assessment template.
We have added some new features and changes, including:
Risk rating
Real-time compliance pie chart
Design and layout has been updated
Additional information to support the HSE 5-step risk assessment process
Fire Service access
Creation of actions — check & test
Add a site plan
Improved PDF layout when exporting/printing
The new template is based on the PAS 79 (Publicly Available Specification-79) methodology for undertaking a fire risk assessment to identify the risk of fire and the consequences if one was to occur.
PAS 79 was produced by the British Standards Institute and is recommended by the Institution of Fire Engineers and the Northern Ireland Fire Safety Panel.
If you have arranged a fire risk assessment to be completed by one of our fire risk assessors, they will be now be using the new fire risk assessment (unless your organisation has a bespoke template).
If you have any questions, or would like to activate the new fire risk assessment now, please contact your Account Manager, and they will be happy to assist you.
“Ready or not, we are already living in a convergence culture” declared Jenkins (Convergence Culture, 2006) during another period of booming technological advancement – notably the dawn of the smartphone age. In broader culture the term ‘convergence’ had already been borrowed from Biology, adopted in Economics, Mathematics and Computing; generally alluding to a theory that basically describes a phenomenon where some creatures living in the same environment – although unrelated to each other, will eventually morph into a similar structure independently or develop identical traits.
In Telecommunications Policy (1998) several authors describe technological convergence along the aforementioned biological lines: multiple functions/technologies predicted to eventually share the same platform either for necessity or to increase efficiency. Fast-forward more than 20 years and the digital landscape has not failed to live up to lofty predictions, with the modern internet certainly boosting the speed in which progress has occurred.
Currently it has become expected that almost every electronic device serves multiple functions. For example the wristwatch can now receive and make phone calls alongside serving as a digital running and exercise companion – surprisingly the (then lauded) Fitbit was only launched in 2010. However for Q3 of 2018, Apple’s Smartwatch leapfrogged Fitbit for second place in global shipments and market share, achieving a year-over-year growth of 54% compared to Fitbit’s 3.1% shrinkage; an impressive feat for a company merely incorporating a related activity into their ‘smartwatch’ platform – convergence reaping benefits.
Convergence Meets Compliance
Health & safety compliance has also experienced convergence, albeit at a slower pace than larger culture. Any potential advancements in the industry are of course expected to be subject to – and limited by health & safety legislation and regulations; and this is important because legislation (primarily the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974) created the government agency Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and gave them (to be more specific, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) broad powers in forming prosecutable health & safety regulations.
However the enhanced accessibility of up-to-date and indexed legislation online through the HSE’s information portals has meant that external consultation of health & safety law is in essence no longer needed. Realistically a medium to small company can compose its health & safety policy internally with minimal prior expertise. Along similar lines, the subject of data protection law which was passed as the GDPR in 2018 and the Data Protection Act of 1998 before that (addressed by Whenmouth previously here) has in practice converged with health & safety under the broad umbrella of compliance.
Compliance – or in this context: ‘regulatory compliance’, is simply about an organisation adhering to internal and/or external regulations for which incurred penalties range from a small fine to full-blown prosecution. So for example, a fire risk assessment and GDPR training for the organisation’s Data Protection Officer/s (both which are mandatory under current law) and tangible proof that these activities have been completed (eg. certificates) means that a singular system that logs, stores, and makes this proof immediately accessible trumps alternatively having multiple separate systems for this, especially for convenience and time-efficiency.
Increasing efficiency normally results in the reduction of business operating costs; and the emergence of software that has the capacity to incorporate various related activities under the compliance umbrella has been inevitable. Another example: Human Resources programs and Learning Management Systems (LMS) operate at different points along the compliance scale, but the desire to integrate related functions into a singular platform has seen the emergence and growth of software like Smartlog, which both manages compliance-relevant employee data and allocates mandatory e-learning courses to selected members of staff.
The Importance of a Core Competency
In order to successfully sell units, a highly capable product still needs credibility, especially one that has converged. Much like Apple’s branding retaining its credibility in the fitness and health watch market (as mentioned previously) or Samsung’s vast electronics experience massively contributing in their overtaking of Nokia as the market leader for mobile phone unit sales in 2012: a core competency is needed in order to retain any market credibility and successful integrate.
Amidst the integration of health & safety e-learning, risk assessment templates, site management alerts, logs, task allocation & monitoring, and (soon to be) asset management into Smartlog; Safesmart’s core competency lies in a history of fire safety engineering and consultations as well as an active fire risk assessment service that is up and down the country every week. It is a brand that puts fire safety at the top of the compliance pile, with the experience and expertise to back this up.
This is mainly because fire safety remains the heart of workplace health & safety, with 11,141 accidental non-residential fires attended by the Fire and Rescue services in England during 2017/18. These incidents resulted in 12 fatalities and 653 casualties with notably 2,245 (20%) of the fires occurred in offices/call centres, retail and hospitals/medical care; reinforcing both the ethical and legal need for all types of businesses to conduct a thorough fire risk assessment regularly.
Overall fire accident deaths only accounted for 8.3% of the 144 total workplace fatalities in 2017/18, however alongside the devastating personal injuries and losses of life, fire incidents by nature also more often result in copious amounts of property and asset damage of which very few businesses would be able to recover from financially.
Summary
According to HSE (2018) there has been a long-term downward trend in the rate of fatal injury per 100,000 workers since 1989, with the 2017/18 rate around a fifth (1/5) of the 1988/89 figures. So evidently workplace safety has improved over the years; and alongside the technological leaps and bounds in communications during the last couple of decades, improvements are also occurring in the delivery of health & safety compliance management and training, especially in regards to efficiency.
Convergence continues to drive innovations in the digital sphere and larger society, but with seemingly endless possibilities in the amount of different business management functions that can be potentially converged into a single platform, any limit will simply depend on the business and their compliance needs. But objectively some functions are more important than others, especially in relation to the law; which essentially means that across the board there is a one size fits all option.
Bibliography
Bohlin, E. (ed.)(1998) ‘Convergence and new regulatory frameworks: A comparative study of regulatory approaches to Internet telephony’ in ‘Telecommunications Policy Vol.22, Issue 10′. Elsevier
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture. New York University Press
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