The Importance of Facility Based Emergency Notification in the Corporate Environment
The Importance of Facility Based Emergency Notification in the Corporate Environment
By Erik Stafford, Director, Commercial Sales at Alertus Technologies
According to the United States Department of Labor “upwards of 2,000,000 American workers have reported being victims of workplace violence.” In 2014, over 400 of those were workplace homicides.
Corporate emergency notification in many instances is lagging behind the public sector both in the effectiveness of their solutions, but also in awareness of the capabilities of such systems and their ability to utilize existing infrastructure. A large part of this lag can be attributed to the inception of the Clery Act.
This mandates that public universities keep statistics and disclose criminal acts on or around their campus. Additionally, and more importantly, this also required “timely warning.” While vague in description, this requirement has spawned a lot of the growth and innovation in the Emergency Notification industry, and the wide adoption of Emergency Notification systems and plans across the public sector.
The private sector, though not bound by the “timely warning” aspect or any other of the Clery Act, does have responsibility for the safety of its employees and guests in the workplace, and is understandably held liable when that safety is not adequately provided.
Emergency Notification Systems can be broken down into three key areas
Distributed Recipient
Facility Based
Wide Area
Admittedly, the natural inclination is to gravitate to Distributed Recipient. After all, you can’t help but see half of the population glued to their phone screens at almost all times. This is a great place to start, but is just that, a start.
Some examples where Distributed Recipient doesn’t work include situations where contractors and vendors are on site, employees haven't opted-in to the system and areas where cell phones are not permitted or don’t receive service. With these unique situations and numerous others, an additional and equally important layer of notification is sorely needed.
Facility based notification not only provides that second layer of protection, but also answers the challenges directly related to distributed recipient notification, and when combined offers a complete and highly effective integrated Emergency Notification System.