“Rapid notification of a threat can save lives by keeping people out of harm’s way.”
– U.S. Department of Justice
It’s a scenario no business wants to think about: an active shooter or violent offender on the premises. From 2000 to 2017, there were 250 active shooter incidents in the United States. These horrific acts of violence took place across industries and geographic locations. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016 alone saw 500 workplace homicides in the U.S. Read More
For employees of property management companies, meeting strangers and showing them empty apartments, homes, or commercial spaces is simply part of the job. Like other lone workers (such as real estate agents, home healthcare employees, maintenance and repair employees, and utility workers) it’s also a major safety concern. Read More
This past Tuesday, AlertMedia, in coordination with Continuity Insights, sponsored a webinar on how to choose the right communication software. It was led by Scott Ryder, AlertMedia’s Chief Product Officer, and Peter Steinfeld, head of sales. Scott has 20 years of experience building software solutions for businesses while Peter brings 17 years of experience in the disaster recovery industry. Scott and Peter shared practical insights and advice on key features to consider in a system, critical questions to ask potential vendors, and how to find a system that will best fit your organization’s specific business requirements. Read More
Preparing a business for the unknown requires a series of important steps to protect your employees and your operations. For many business owners, this foundation starts with an emergency plan and grows to include a business continuity plan, an inclement weather policy, and perhaps even a lone worker policy to keep employees safe.
So, you’ve made your emergency plans and identified the best people to lead your teams through each phase. Now, it’s time to practice with the low-cost but high-impact emergency planning event known as a tabletop exercise. Read More
In today’s school environment, effective communication is a complex undertaking. The average public school in America has more than 500 students. Meanwhile, colleges and universities can easily have upwards of tens of thousands of students. On top of that, the different members of a school community—students, faculty, staff members, and parents—tend to have wildly different communication preferences and behaviors. Read More
Remember the game “telephone”? One person starts by whispering to the person sitting beside them until the message reaches the end of the line. The sentence eventually becomes so jumbled it barely resembles the original.
This, essentially, is a phone tree. And if you can also recall from your childhood the laughter and chaos that would often ensue by the time that sentence reached the last person, you can probably infer that a phone tree isn’t exactly a sound strategy for delivering effective, timely emergency communications. Read More
Now is a great time to take a fresh look at your organization’s emergency management program. You should be identifying opportunities for improvement and developing strategies to address them in 2019. But that’s easier said than done, right? After all, building a comprehensive emergency management plan that can be applied uniformly to prepare for and respond to the wide range of hazardous and potentially disruptive events organizations today face—from IT outages and severe weather to natural disasters and terrorism—is no small task. Read More
Safety is the first priority for any company that seeks to protect employees and customers. Knowing the hazards that exist in workplace offices, equipment, and machinery is the first step toward preventing injury or even death.
The Occupational Safety and Health Organization (OSHA) publishes a list of its most frequently cited violations in the workplace. By examining this list, employers can analyze the dangers inherent in their workplaces and plan to avoid them. Read More
No business owner wants to think about a violent event happening at their workplace, but each year, more than 2 million American employees report having been a victim of various types of workplace violence. According the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 409 workers were fatally injured in work-related attacks in 2014. To put that into perspective, that’s about 16 percent of the 4,821 workplace fatalities from the same year. Read More
The worst time to think about emergency planning is when the threat of an emergency looms over your business. When that happens, no business owner is glad they pushed off emergency planning “to Q1” or the hazy future: “We’ll get to that later.”
A better way for businesses to prepare is with the “all hazards” approach to emergency planning. The all hazards approach is defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as an “integrated approach to emergency preparedness planning that focuses on capacities and capabilities that are critical to preparedness for a full spectrum of emergencies or disasters.” Read More
