The telecom industry has always been facing risks. Unfortunately, this trend has not yet passed.
This is not only due to the nature of the work but also a large mobile workforce. There are all the common risks of remote fieldwork that challenge telecom engineers and technicians daily. Team members face the hurdles and risks of elevated work, fall protection, and confined spaces safety issues.
Nonetheless, it’s the employer’s responsibility to keep their engineers and technicians safe and sound.
Clear regulations for health and safety standards in telecommunications are also essential, including its work practices, conditions, operations, and all related processes performed on the field or in the workplace.
So, what are the best ways to improve the safety of your telecom workers? This article explores some of them.
Creating a safety-first culture
In the telecommunication industry, safety culture is critically essential. Like any work environment, the introduction of safety must start from the top of the organization.
Behavior forms a major part of the risks, particularly unsafe behavior, which can lead to trauma. Building upon a safety culture, therefore, can greatly influence necessary change.
As a responsible leader, you should look for solutions that will promote this culture, which would, in turn, enable safety to be part of everyday work, regardless of the employee’s location and current job. The best way to achieve this is by improving collaboration between the field and the office. Create consistency across your company and ensure your workers 360 visibility and transparency.
In building a safety-first culture, you will need an excellent field service management solution. So, don’t hesitate to find the tool that can put safety front and center in day-to-day work.
Field service management can also ensure the maintenance and discovery of new best practices, up-to-date training, safeguarding of subcontractors, and bringing new employees up to speed. What’s more, it will ultimately protect your workers, reduce incidents, and avoid costly fines for poor safety practices.
Developing an integrated mobility strategy
An agile and integrated mobility strategy will work best for telecommunication companies of today. Why? It will ensure the most effective safety management for mobile workers and assets.
Having mobile operations that are simply glued and pieced together from siloed solutions, or through manual processes, might not be enough nowadays. However, a single platform providing real-time visibility will help you optimize mobility as well as achieve the best operational execution while ensuring safety in the field.
However, pay extra attention to the challenges brought on by integrating new technologies, which disrupt traditional methods of managing field service and assets. Once you solve the challenges, you will be able to eliminate silos and free up your workers’ time.
Enhancing user experience
User experience is one of the factors that can make or break the implementation of technology, and this is a fact for many other industries.
So, ensure that technology is easy to use for your mobile workforce, and avoid complicated interfaces that could take more time for employees to adopt. Workers need to adapt quickly to solutions and unexpected changes. Pay attention to how intuitive a solution is, as this is equally crucial for the safety of your operators.
Ensuring complete safety of your mobile workers
Last but not least, don’t overlook the importance of ensuring that your mobile employees are protected around the clock. For instance, location intelligence helps mobile workers easily locate the right assets for their projects and restricted access to apps and devices for a vehicle in motion is crucial in improving driver safety and preventing disruptions.
Conclusion
A solution that can integrate multiple aspects of field service, asset management, and other resources, is vital to running a telecom organization. Today, workers’ safety is a priority, and to achieve this you need to update your safety management system and bring it up to date.
With the right solution for your remote workers, you will be able to keep your employees safe out in the field and provide them with all the data they require to thrive and increase productivity.
In the end, communication is key. If you find the best solution for your employees to communicate within the organization properly, your chances of quickly overcoming any challenge will grow exponentially.
