It can be easy to assume that high-risk industries have all of the right safeguards in place to keep people, the environment, and assets safe. Yet, if you are a senior manager or director, it’s possible that you could be personally prosecuted should a fatal workforce incident occur. With an average of 140 fatal accidents to employees occurring per year, it’s important to ensure that your company takes the appropriate steps to protect its people.
Situational awareness requires managers and senior leaders to have end-to-end oversight of their people’s locations, as well as the potential hazards that could impact them. Current approaches to people monitoring and risk management remain largely localised, creating a divide between local and enterprise-wide incident responses.
While multiple high-risk industries have begun to adopt digital solutions, more needs to be done to establish a connected approach. In light of this, here are three reasons why situational awareness is important for your organisation.
Reason 1: Improve duty of care
Every company understands the importance of its people. Though this is often understood, it does not always translate into thorough worker safeguarding and day-to-day tracking.
If an incident occurs, whether as a result of human factors or a natural disaster, organisations without effective situational awareness solutions are left in the dark. As a result, they face a number of challenges:
- Mustering quickly: Critical time may be lost as companies try to locate and gather their staff. Meanwhile, the incident may begin to escalate.
- Ensuring worker safety: With little knowledge of what has occurred, team leaders are unable to ensure worker safety. The stages of situational awareness are slow, and many members of staff remain uninformed.
- Gathering information: Team leaders seek to gather data from siloed sources, leaving key decisions prone to human error.
- Maintaining duty of care: Even unintentionally, employers risk falling short of essential safety standards.
So, why is situational awareness important, and how can it be used to tackle these challenges?
Using a digital platform, employers can connect people’s real-time location with their profile information, maintaining situational awareness and allowing critical decisions to be made more efficiently.
Rather than focusing on gathering information, leaders can pay attention to the situation at hand. Hazards in both on-shore and off-shore sites can be easily identified, allowing the three levels of response to be processed faster. With worker locations, site details, and incident data all in a single cloud-hosted hub, mental models can be optimised, response times can be reduced, and people can be better protected.
Suggested reading: The digital age is changing how we should respond to incidents — for the better. Find out more in our blog on The Role of Technology in Effective Incident Management.
Reason 2: Minimise risks
Improving situational awareness through a secure, cloud-hosted platform can also be beneficial in minimising day-to-day risks. Digital systems flag potential threats early on, providing risk management teams with a wealth of historical data. Using this, team leaders are able to improve long-term safety behaviours and processes across the enterprise.
As situational awareness increases, companies will begin to enjoy a host of further benefits:
- Safety, security, and incident reporting are improved.
- Insights can be analysed and monitored at locational, regional and enterprise levels.
- Risk management, incident response, and crisis management teams are all able to communicate on the same platform.
Reason 3: Advance performance
Unplanned downtime can be hugely disruptive and costly. With real-time access to people’s locations, managers can make a judgement call on the level of threat or incident and can choose to shut down specific zones within a site, allowing other zones to continue undisrupted.
Why is situational awareness important?
The importance of situational awareness is evident — straightforward access to essential data can make the difference between a site shutdown and a minor operational disruption.
Using cloud-hosted situational awareness software allows companies to assess managing contractor performance. Armed with a wealth of accurate people location data, organisations can compare the activity delivered by a contractor with project plans and invoices, identifying reasons behind delays or budget overruns.
Situational Awareness software
Technology promises to improve outcomes at all levels of the energy sector in the long term. Yet, it first needs to address fragmentation, which makes it difficult to build a 360 view of the state of the organisation, people and assets.
That’s why we built resilienceOS — to connect people, assets, location and risk data into a single platform that provides a unified operating view across the organisation at site, regional and global level. Using the Restrata Platform, you can end fragmentation across different areas of resilience, unlock value by integrating existing and future systems to provide a single source of truth that provides complete situational awareness, keeping people safe and de-risking your operations.
Book a demo of resilienceOS today.