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A Resilience Management Software Buyer's Guide
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How Crisis Management Software Supports Employee Safety & Wellbeing during Crises

For employers, worker safety is one of the most crucial responsibilities, enshrined in the duty of care obligation. What happens during a crisis, though? That responsibility still holds. Only now to maintain it, employers turn to crisis management software.

How does it help? Read on to learn how crisis management software ensures employee safety during a crisis.

Maintaining employee health and safety

 

Backing up, when we talk about employee health and safety in the workplace, we’re talking about duty of care. But what is duty of care, in the first place?

 

In simple terms, the duty of care, a concept that comes from common law, simply means acting towards other in a certain way, in accordance with certain standards. Those standards vary depending on context.

 

Duty of care, in the context of workplace health and safety, usually means the employer responsibility (or duty) to do whatever is “reasonably practicable” to protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of employees.

 

In many jurisdictions, that duty goes beyond physical safety to employee wellbeing and mental health, as well. Indeed, duty of care is the cornerstone of all employee safety programs, which are set up to ensure employee wellbeing – well, wellbeing in the sense of good or safe condition.

 

Duty of care during a crisis

 

Some of you might be asking, what do any of these concepts have to do with crisis and incident management software or crisis management communications tools? And it would be fair to inquire.

 

The simplest answer is that a crisis, a negative event or period that creates an unstable and dangerous situation, is the ultimate test of whether an employer can maintain its duty-of-care obligation.

 

Sure, we might think of slips and falls when we typically consider safety hazards. But the fact of the matter is that many corporate crises – from active shooter incidents to natural disasters to attacks on facilities – present just as much if not more of a health and safety threat as more mundane safety hazards.

 

Crisis management software capabilities to support employee safety during a crisis

 

What’s more, preparing for certain crisis types falls into the bucket of reasonably practicable measures that employers are required to take to ensure employee safety. One of the measures most likely to ensure employee safety is investing in the right crisis management system software, including crisis information management software.  

 

What software features are most likely to support employee safety during a crisis, though? Here are the five capabilities to consider:

 

1. Team activation and collaboration

Key to protecting employees during a crisis is mobilizing teams to respond to the crisis at hand. Crisis management software can expedite that process, with workflows that swiftly notify response teams and keep communication lines open. Certain solutions, allowing team members to easily join dedicated chat groups to discuss incidents, also foster collaboration, enabling personnel to share important details about the crisis, assess the impact of the event, and collectively devise effective response strategies.

2. Situational awareness

Once the crisis is flaring, crisis teams need to know as much as they can to stay on top of the event and protect lives. Crisis management software helps, here, too, improving situational awareness with customizable dashboards that gather data using scrolling banners, live maps and feeds that consolidate information from various sources, including news, weather, social media, traffic, and natural disaster streams.

3. Crisis communications

Being able to communicate to employees with the appropriate messaging (often real-time alerts with instructions) is crucial to ensuring their safety. Crisis management software can help distribute these targeted communications, enabling teams to hyper-target their communications to specific roles, teams, groups, even locations, to ensure the right messages get to the right people at the right time, including links back to any object in the system in the message content.

4. Post-incident reviews

An active crisis might end, but the need for crisis management continues. Indeed, the post-incident review, where teams often identify why a crisis actually happened, is crucial to preventing recurrence and keeping employees safe in the future. To that end, crisis management software can help teams conduct meaningful after-action reviews, improvement activities, and post-incident reviews to capture the key takeaways from any incident or exercise. 

5. Exercise management

And once new insights are learned, teams will have to test out new plans and practices made based on those assumptions to ensure they are ready for a crisis. With an exercise management solution built into crisis management software, teams can be confident that they are prepared to handle any situation that comes their way.

 

What other crisis management software capabilities help ensure employee wellbeing during a critical event? We tackle them all in our Guide to Ensuring Worker Wellbeing During a Crisis.

 

 

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