Given my role here at OnSolve, I live and breathe logistics and communications all day long in my professional life. But keeping everyone safe and informed isn’t just a priority at work – it’s also a big part of my personal life, especially since my family is spread out across the country. Just like our clients, I want all of us to practice situational awareness and stay connected to each other, without causing additional stress in our busy lives.
Reduce Stress with a Personal Touch
Like everyone else, the combination of the pandemic and the uptick in man-made and weather-related incidents over the past several years has made me even more protective of the people I love most. My peace of mind is tied to my ability to keep everyone in my family in touch and aware of what’s on the radar in our various locations. Since we’re spread out in various cities across the country from California to Utah to Florida, this takes some coordination.
Fortunately, I’m able to take advantage of the technology I use at work to keep my loved ones safe. OnSolve Critical Communications has a capability called Risk Alerts that enables me to monitor my family’s locations and receive advanced warnings of pending critical events. It was so easy to set up – customization was a breeze and each of us was able to select how we want to be alerted (text vs. email vs. phone). We can even create options to send simple “I’m okay” messages when a significant event happens.
What I really love is that I often receive Risk Alerts before my weather app even gives me a heads-up. I frequently travel, whether with OnSolve or personally and Risk Alerts help me determine if weather may impact my travel, so I can change plans if necessary.
In fact, this came in handy just the other week when I was flying to Utah to visit my sister. During this trip, I received red flag warnings for Park City due to fires near Salt Lake. After receiving these alerts, I was able to look into the fires and see that they wouldn’t affect my flight and were far enough away from where I would be located that I didn’t need to worry. It also continued to update me on the wildfire so I could monitor if the fires were to spread near my sister’s vicinity. And if she did receive an evacuation alert, I’d have been notified immediately.
While this is just a small example of how I use OnSolve to protect the people in my life, it demonstrates how easy it is for organizations of any size to use Risk Alerts to protect and inform your people.
Extend a Hand to Your Work Family
Naturally, you want to keep your employees safe. It's part of your legal obligation and duty of care, but there's also a personal side to it. If you're anything like me, many of your co-workers are part of your extended family, especially given all you've gone through together during the past few years.
Now that the hybrid model of work is the norm, it can feel more challenging to keep track of everyone. The obstacles only increase during crisis when the duty of care is even more urgent and you’re operating at a heightened state of stress. Just to give you some perspective, since 1980 the U.S. has sustained 323 weather and climate disasters totaling costs in excess of $2.195 trillion.
To reach everyone more efficiently in those moments, you need the ability to create custom groups and monitor specific events and severity levels. Without focused, relevant alerts, people stop paying attention and your messages lose all their power. With this in mind, the importance of a risk alerting system with built in automation, customization and targeting can’t be stressed enough.
Through our relationship with The Weather Company®, OnSolve Critical Communications deliver Risk Alerts to give you several advantages:
- Speed: Time-consuming manual processes are unnecessary thanks to automation. When The Weather Company releases an update, the alert system immediately sends out the alert.
- Relevance: Now you can get the right information to the right people at the right time by predefining location-specific contact groups in conjunction with your various alert types. This ensures your messages go only to those impacted by the event.
- Usability: Your account can be created quickly and easily with our intuitive interface. It gives you the ability to define the critical events applicable to your organization, specify who receives which alerts and determine criteria for the various severity levels.
This level of detail facilitates proactive situational awareness by delivering clear, actionable messages.
Protection Is Easy with the Right Features
By integrating with The Weather Company, OnSolve Critical Communications pulls data directly and sends alerts to your people in one seamless process. It’s not just weather either – civil emergencies, environmental hazards, infrastructure impacts and public alerts are also on the radar.
Risk Alerts gives organizations a range of customizable features:
- Subscriptions: It’s easy to prepare for any combination of event and location with custom groups, which offer the ability to determine when alerts should be sent and to whom, based on locations, profiles and alert types.
- Automated Alerts: When alerts are triggered automatically as soon as an event occurs, everyone gets the message quickly without the need of human interaction.
- Calls to Action (CTAs): Customizable CTAs allow you to deliver specific instructions for any event. You can even include optional response prompts for specific critical events so your employees can confirm they’re safe or ask for assistance.
Enhance Your Communications Strategy
Situational awareness can help you keep everyone in the loop about existing and potential threats near your people and operations. The accuracy of our data facilitates more informed decisions and more deliberate, actionable messaging. When OnSolve is a part of your communications strategy, you’ll find it’s easy to protect your employees - just like you do your family.
Check out our OnSolve Critical Communications with Global Risk Alerts product summary and learn how the OnSolve family of experts can help keep your family of employees safe.
