Leading the way on personal safety into 2021 and beyond

It was great to be involved in SHP’s Webinar Wednesdays in the last couple of weeks. It was my first time as a panellist on an SHP Webinar, and the topic of leadership, specifically entitled Is there a difference between leadership and safety leadership?, was interestingly debated between the other panellists and I. The session included contributors from large businesses including L’Oréal, Sodexo and Carlberg, and we broadly agreed on several points:

• Leadership is not solely the responsibility of a senior job role or title
• Good leaders are required to have the ability to take people with them to reach a key goal
• Conveying a compelling vision along with context is crucial to gaining buy-in
• Leaders can only act when they have visibility of the whole picture across their organisation.
  
  

Having been a leader in operational roles in several businesses over the last fifteen years, 2020 saw me step into leading SoloProtect’s UK and EU businesses – taking charge of a company that has helped to shape the lone worker industry for over fifteen years and one now supplying solutions directly across a number of country markets. Throw a global pandemic into the mix at the same time, and it was immediately important to have a positive and clearly defined vision with which to move forward. Which in turn, was a key driver for the business to achieve its goals for development over the next number of years.

A central part of our plan was to create a wider scope of functionality to support our customers' management teams, new future-proofed technology, and a greater choice of pricing solutions within our offering to customers. Delivering value on personal safety, but also in terms of our solutions being an enabler to deliver greater organisational value.

If successful leadership is taking people on a required ‘journey’, we wanted SoloProtect to deliver solutions that play a major role within a successful safety culture. Where it permeates across an organisation - delivering real operational value to the mid-tiers of management and the end users of a solution. Helping to devolve responsibility, drive accountability and deliver usage behaviour that moves an organisation towards its goals. A safety culture that effectively adds value to an organisation’s bottom-line profitability.

To that end, we took a fresh look at how we could deliver this and so, in January 2021, we are relaunching the SoloProtect Personal Safety Solution. Our updated solutions will give our customers access to a completely new range of modern services and our very latest lone worker devices, which are tailored for large and medium enterprise deployments.

Central to every SoloProtect solution is our innovative and feature-rich management platform - SoloProtect Insights. Insights provides managers with a vital tool to help them make much lighter work of what we know from experience can be traditionally a very manual process for them. Our customers tell us that it has helped them drive better organisation, save management time, give greater and easier oversight, and deliver live access to digestible data points for reporting at user, team and group level.

As I said in the recent Leadership Webinar, I am passionate in the belief that you can only manage what you can see. This is where we believe Insights significantly helps our customers to maximise the value of their investment while also delivering efficiencies for already busy management.

We will be releasing further information on our relaunched solution and forthcoming Insights developments early in 2021 so do watch out for those.