HR’s Role in Employee Safety [Webinar Recap]

In mid-August, AlertMedia hosted a webinar on HR’s role in keeping employees safe. The conversation was held between John Muller, Director of Talent at Gehring Group, Sandra Stolte, VP of HR Benefits and Operations at Healthgrades, and Peter Steinfeld, AlertMedia’s SVP of Sales.

John and Sandra provided valuable insight on the ways that HR helps keep employees safe in their organizations. If you missed the webinar, you can access the recording here.

Peter kicked off the conversation by covering the various challenges facing organizations this year—from hurricane season, to cyber attacks, to the pandemic. We face a wider range of emergencies than ever before. The webinar focused on what HR can be doing to keep employees safe during this unprecedented time.

Key Topics Discussed:

John, Sandra, and Peter discussed some key considerations for HR’s role in employee safety this year:

An organization’s duty of care

Duty of care is the legal and moral duty a company has to protect its employees from unnecessary risk of harm. Essentially, any time an employee, vendor, or customer comes onto your property or under your supervision, you have a duty to protect them from potential dangers.

Specifically, you have a legal obligation to communicate the dangers and risks associated with performing functions within your business. This is true even during a time of widespread remote work—like we are in now.

How HR fits in

HR plays a critical role in maintaining a company’s duty of care. In smaller organizations, HR may carry the sole responsibility for employee safety.

But in every organization, HR must make employee safety a priority as they handle:

• Talent acquisition
• People data
• Employee issues
• Company policies

Personal safety is a basic employee need. Nothing impacts the employee experience more than ensuring your people feel physically and psychologically safe at work. As the department that handles employee acquisition, onboarding, and dispute resolution, HR is uniquely positioned to fulfill this need.

The benefits of employee safety

A strong employee safety program brings significant benefits in other areas as well. Prioritizing employee safety can have an impact on:

• Recruiting
• Retention
• Engagement
• Productivity
• Culture
• Legal/Insurance costs

The ROI from employee safety is real—and comes from many different angles.

Technology solutions for maintaining employee safety

A critical component of maintaining employee safety is equipping your company with the right set of tools. Your organization needs to be able to:

• Streamline company-wide communication
• Monitor threats in real time
• Perform wellness checks
• Mitigate loss and speed up recovery

AlertMedia brings all these capabilities together into one employee safety solution. Integrating directly with an organization’s Human Capital Management (HCM) system, AlertMedia provides HR with the technology they need to fulfill their duty of care and keep their people safe.