"Our care and commitment to safety applies to all stakeholders – residents and customers, our employees, and anyone who enters a Unite Students’ environment. We’re delighted that the case-study feedback reflects this."

Unite Students' employees discuss lone worker safety, and what it means to them when a company invests in their safety.

Unite Students is the UK’s longest established, private landlord for people in higher education. Creating places through the delivery of purpose-built student accommodation, it has provided a home for over 600,000 people since forming in 1992. The company now employs more than 1400 staff – people with a passion for creating great environments, to help their residents settle into new surroundings, whilst providing security and support where needed.

A significant number of Unite Students’ workforce can potentially work alone, and/or out of hours, at night and at weekends. As well as this, they have roles that are spread across campuses and throughout the city, with duties including student welfare issues, checking buildings and communal areas, and even discussion around debt arrears. Therefore, it’s clear that Unite Students needed a solution in place to ensure their employees were protected and felt empowered.

After speaking with their employees Unite Students discovered their workforce could, at times, feel intimidated, scared and had faced anti-social and threatening situations whilst at work. Being a company that takes the safety of their employees extremely seriously they immediately began searching for a solution.

Matt Perks, Unite Students City Manager explains:

"If it gets out of hand then it’s really important that our employees have excellent support and they can get hold of the local police, if and should they need to, but also that they feel safe when doing so. The SoloProtect solution offers exactly that; a discreet device that allows our employees to carry out their duties with peace of mind. On top of this, the service we’ve received from SoloProtect has been brilliant."

SoloProtect devices are discreet and supported by the 24/7, EN 50518 accredited, Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC). This enables a lone worker to raise a ‘Red Alert’ at the push of a button, making a call directly from their lone worker device, into the ARC, for prompt verification, and escalation – appropriately, and in line with any incident taking place.

It’s important to protect your staff no matter how big or small your company is, and Unite Students does everything possible to meet the required duty of care to its workforce. Unite Students strongly believe in safeguarding the wellbeing of all of their employees, including those that work alone which is why they’ve invested in a SoloProtect lone worker solution.

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