If you’re in the Telco business, you know that safety on the field is paramount. With the workload increasing and more needing to be done in the same amount of time, you must be wondering how to improve the safety of your field technicians.
You might have already considered some of these, and here are 5 ways to improve the safety of field technicians we got from our Health and Safety directors, based on their experience.
Create a strong safety culture
The best way to ensure your field technicians will understand the importance of safety is to have a strong safety culture. The truth is safety is about the individual as much as it is about a group. That means, that all your field technicians should know and understand the rules when it comes to health and safety regulations. That way, ensuring that all health and safety requirements are adequately done will become a part of their daily routine.
The other important thing to know is what to do if injury occurs. Make sure you have a clear procedure and chain of command so that your field technicians know who to turn to if occupational injures happen.
Protect and educate your workers who work at height
If you are in the Telecommunication business, you know that there is a lot of work at height. Working at height can be dangerous by itself, without it including equipment, tools, and poles.
When preparing your field technicians, make sure that they have work permits, are physically and mentally prepared for working at height, and that there are at least two workers trained to work at height on site.
As always, before starting work, carry out a safety risk assessment for a given location.
How to make sure the risk assessment is done well?
Your chances of doing the risk assessment well increase when using CloseOut’s pre-check feature that makes sure your field technicians have all necessary protective equipment, checks the state of tools, and whether the location is secured and safe.
Want to learn more about it?
Inspect and replace equipment and tools
Equipment is the other half of your fieldwork. While it’s a major help to your field technicians, bad, old, or damaged equipment is a strong contender for major safety risks.
Check all equipment before work on the field starts, make sure you have all the necessary tools that are in good working order, and if there’s anything that seems like a potential problem or hazard, replace it for another.
With regular checks and a good idea of the state of all equipment and tools, you’ll also have a better overview of potential costs once the need for new equipment arises.
Of course, the other part is that you must ensure that the workers are using the equipment and that they do that properly. You could use CloseOut’s AI, which can check if everything is in order from a picture uploaded to its cloud automatically.
Make sure everyone follows procedures and best practices
We already mentioned how important prevention is. Educating your workers could make an enormous difference in a critical situation. You can organize internal training by one of your experts or hire organizations that are dedicated to health and safety education for workers.
Once your workers are educated and properly trained, it is helpful to have all the safety regulations and protocols written down in an easy-to-read-and-understand way and available to every employee. Those instructions can easily be added in CloseOut when you work on creating a workflow. If they are ever in doubt, they can look at the document and be reminded of all the steps.
Another important aspect of worker safety is making sure all your field technicians have proper certificates and knowledge to work at height, special tools, or under conditions needed to make a project successful. Field workers can often work long hours in various conditions; knowing for a fact who is properly certified will also help ensure their safety, as well as the safety of other workers on the field.
Use technology to ensure safety
Safety is paramount, to stress it out one more time.
Like we said, safety is something that concerns all of us and is dependent on every person engaged. However, the biggest responsibility is on the person in charge. It is only reasonable that you would want to find a way that will ensure that everything is in order.
That is why we made CloseOut.
Presenting CloseOut:
CloseOut is a real-time quality control management solution created by people in the industry, who know what issues Telco companies deal with on a regular basis. It is made to make your job easier, and to help you scale up your business while saving you time and earning you money.
CloseOut prides itself in its AI, as-built documentation available on click, and many other useful features that we found are needed to increase not only fieldwork safety, productivity and more, but to increase the level of professionalism and amount of work a company can take on.
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