Tracking systems are coming into their own as a means of ensuring lone worker protection and demonstrating legal compliance, says Sharon Clancy

Interest in personal as opposed to vehicle tracking systems has seen a notable increase over the past couple of years as managers have striven to grasp the implications of the Corporate Manslaughter Act. When the Act became law in 2008 the issue of health and safety of mobile workers shifted up the corporate agenda to senior manager and director level.

Employers have of course long had responsibilities under duty-of-care health and safety at work legislation for ensuring their employees are working in a safe environment. However, previously those duties were ill-defined, and the risk of prosecution was slim for senior managers, who could claim ignorance of work practices as a defence.

Companies now recognise that in this new climate, they require systems that demonstrate compliance. 'We are definitely seeing an increased need for senior managers to prove that effective duty of care policies and procedures are in place and being actively followed by their employees,' says Steve Reynolds, managing director of TBS Enterprise Mobility.

 

'Central to this is the development and evolution of lone worker monitoring solutions. These can supply vital assurances about the whereabouts and wellbeing of field workers, whose activities may frequently involve them being a considerable distance away from their headquarters.'

'Demand for personal tracking systems is increasing,' agrees Clive Fearn, marketing director for The Barcode Warehouse. 'It is clearly being driven by the increasing demands on organisations around health and safety/corporate governance issues surrounding lone workers.'

Most mobile workers are lone workers, of course, and how you go about ensuring they are adequately protected can depend on the situations they regularly find themselves in, and how you identify the potential risk. Lone workers include a wide range of people from sales staff to service engineers, healthcare workers and probation officers. It also includes those who work alone and outside normal office hours – security staff, cleaners and maintenance staff, for instance.

This very diversity means that managers face particular problems when planning a safe working environment, says Larry Klimczyk, chief executive of Blackbay. 'Managers must make sure that they assess the risk to their lone workers and take the appropriate measures to avoid or contain risks where appropriate.'

Privacy

Should you view personnel tracking as an invasion of privacy – an unwelcome and intrusive example of monitoring employees' activities – or as responsible management adhering to considerate corporate governance policies? Terran Churcher, managing director of mobile data specialist Codegate, is happy to square up to that question, and his view is that the answer can depend on your role in the company.

Admitting that tracking of individuals can appear to have elements of Big Brother about it, he says some workers definitely appreciate it. 'To some it is comforting: to a lone security guard in an isolated industrial estate at 3 am, for example; to the care worker visiting patients in their own homes; to the electricity worker investigating a power cut at in a remote location, sometimes hundreds of yards from their vehicle.'

Personal tracking provides reassurance, agrees Andy Kirk, sales and marketing director for Quartix. 'It allows workers to go about their business secure in the knowledge that whatever happens, support is always available. They are never isolated. This is especially important to mobile workers who have responsibility for transporting valuable or vulnerable loads.'

And for those who are worried that they might be tracked even on personal business, much tracking software be configured so that workers can deactivate the tracking function outside working hours.

Functionality

So where do you get personal tracking systems from, and what do they look like? The good news is that most vehicle tracking systems already offer a de facto level of personal tracking; after all; if you know where the vehicle is, for much of the time you also know where your mobile worker is. 'A lot of lone worker protection can also be integrated into workflow management applications,' points out Cognito's David Perry.

Blackbay's Larry Klimczyk agrees. 'In today's tough business climate, businesses should be looking at solutions that will help them ensure that their mobile workforce is operating as productively and efficiently as possible, at the same time as ensuring lone mobile worker safety,' he says.

'A fully integrated enterprise mobility solution running on a handheld mobile device delivers complete visibility of mobile workforce operations at the same time as allowing supervisors to keep track of lone mobile workers.'

Many of the features of modern tracking systems can be used to track workers as well as vehicles. Geo-fencing, for example, has become a useful tool in monitoring arrival and departure of vehicles at customer premises. The same tool can be used to monitor arrival and departure of mobile service engineers. Basic protection comes from monitoring activities, and receiving an alert if the worker does not make it to a call on time, says Cognito's David Perry.

The amount of additional functionality required will, of course, be determined by the risk assessment. For example, do all your mobile workers need a panic button in case of emergency, or only those working in especially risky environments? What frequency of monitoring is deemed adequate? Perry points out that, depending on the risk, some companies will also need policies in place to manage situations where the mobile worker is unable to make that panic call.

Sounding the alarm

'Many thousands of mobile devices are already deployed to track the whereabouts of an organisation's mobile workforce,' says Clive Fearn of The Barcode Warehouse. 'All that is required is additional integrated functionality that allows a lone worker to push a button to send an alert that he/she is in trouble. The company can decide how such an alert should be handled.'

'The application should not rely on the worker clicking a button to confirm they have arrived or left,' advises Simon Morris, vice president of marketing for ClickSoftware. The company now offers ClickLocate, a location-based personal tracking system that automatically updates the mobile worker's location when they are within, for example, half a mile of the next call or delivery.

Cognito's Perry also feels it is important that processes should be automated as far as possible, and that the onus to report difficulty should be removed from the worker. 'After all, they may not be in a position to press a panic button.' He says responses can be tailored according to historical data – for instance, with priority given where there is evidence of continual hostility or violence at a given address.

Terran Churcher agrees a response strategy is essential. 'If the worker doesn't use the application on their handheld device for a set period, the application can text a message and email colleagues to investigate.' Codegate's applications make this as simple as possible: if workers hold down the number five numeric key (the one with the raised spot) for longer than 5 seconds, this alerts the 24/7 call centre, opens a voice channel and sends text messages to the worker's nearest colleague.

Masternaut's LoKate wristwatch-style personal tracker has a series of alert levels from green (covering basic duty-of-care risk) through to red, which identifies problems and escalates the response process through to duress (for extreme circumstances where users might be jeopardy).

Personal trackers

Although vehicle tracking systems offer some personal tracking features, a new generation of personal tracking devices has emerged on the market, running on smartphones or other devices with built-in GPS chipsets. Among the attractions is the ability to track personnel when they are away from the vehicle. Often these services are supplied on a pay-as-you-go charging basis, applied per worker per month.

'Today's convergence of telecommunications and computing technologies facilitates the supply of handheld devices which incorporate GPS, GPRS, and Wi-Fi radios together with advanced computing power,' says Codegate's Churcher. 'This combination of technologies enables managers to monitor, measure and manage remote workers.'

The focus on monitoring workers who may be away from vehicles means that most of the personal tracking applications to date have been configured to run on smartphones and handheld devices running the Windows Mobile operating system, rather than conventional rugged handhelds – although that may change now that more rugged devices incorporate GPS chipsets.

Verilocation's Guardian Ranger, for example, will work on any GPS-enabled handheld device running Windows Mobile and on BlackBerry devices, while TBS Mobility's Personal Safety Location works on GPS-enabled mobile devices, and is part of its Taskmaster field service application.

'The beauty is that many businesses don't need to invest in any new hardware,' points out the company's Andrew Overton. 'It will work with most smartphones with built-in GPS capabilities.

'You can do virtually anything with it, including tracking where staff are now in real time, and maintaining historical data. You can be alerted when they arrive at specific locations using geo-fences. You can even view a device's location overlaid on 3D aerial imaging.'

Masternaut's M-Guard incorporates a real-time emergency assistance button and one-key dialling for two-way voice communication. The LoKate wristwatch incorporates a miniature SIM card and GPS receiver with a panic button. When an alarm is raised the location is pinpointed on Microsoft Virtual Earth maps.

Where next?

The technology and systems now exist for closer remote monitoring of mobile employees. The next question for employers is to evaluate exactly what the potential health and safety risks are, and either eliminate them or manage that risk.

Interdean's telematics system helps remove concerns about worker safety

Interdean provides a range of services for companies relocating employee nationally and internationally. It has 47 offices in 35 countries. It operates its own fleet of 45 articulated trucks and trailers for cross-border removals, which is supplemented by locally-based rigid trucks and vans for local collections and deliveries. The company also operates a fleet or 130 cars.

The company has installed Cybit's Fleetstar telematics system throughout its European network. 'As our fleet operates across Europe, we needed a solution that could provide EU-wide installation and technical support,' says Derrick Haggerty, group transport consultant.

'Fleetstar gives us complete visibility across the entire fleet, which will enhance the security of our drivers and loads as well as the level of service we provide to customers.'

The 15 offices with transport fleets have previously been run as 15 different transport operations, explains Haggerty. 'By consolidating all cross-border movements into a central despatch operation, we can relocate loads on to different vehicles, and reduce wasted mileage and empty running.'

The aim is to save 20 per cent on transport costs, and reduce carbon emissions by 10 per cent. 'Reducing our environmental impact and demonstrating our commitment to health and safety are key policies in our strategy of being a socially responsible company.'

'We have now ramped up our monitoring of potential health and safety issues,' says Andy Johnson, who is responsible for health and safety issues at Interdean. 'We have always had liability for the health and safety of our employees, of course, and we have always taken it seriously. However, the impact of the Corporate Manslaughter Act two years ago has made us ensure that we have the necessary due processes to support our policies.'

He adds: 'Telematics is a good tool for doing that. We can set parameters so, for example, we get an email alert if staff exceed the speed limit.' That is less about Big Brother spying, explains Johnson, and more about the company having a responsibility to ensure employees operate responsibly. 'As a company we have a duty of care to the public as well as our staff.' Drivers who require awareness training will be provided with it, he says.

Fleetstar has been particularly beneficial in monitoring mobile employees in vans and cars, says Andy. 'Truck drivers are already monitored quite closely via the tachograph and drivers' hours regulations. However, until we introduced Fleetstar, we had no means of checking the behaviour of our car and van drivers. Now we have introduced policies and measures to control driving speeds and drivers' hours for all vehicles closely.'

Interdean operates in Eastern Europe, and tracking is important to monitor progress of vehicles and to ensure drivers are safe. 'It is easy for drivers to find themselves inadvertently in an unsafe situation if, for example, they take a incorrect turn.

All Interdean's offices are geofenced, along with ferry ports, customs points and customers' addresses. The system has become a key tool, says Haggerty, both in providing real-time automatic location updates and in improving security for drivers.

'Our customers entrust us with all their personal possessions, so updates on quoted arrival times are very important to alleviate any anxiety should a vehicle be delayed. For drivers, we can investigate any delays and confirm they are safe.'