Three reasons why your business must share risk information

We think the benefit of sharing risk locations is so large that it is inevitable that your business will eventually do so.

There are three main reasons for our strongly held belief on this issue.

Reason 1: Workplaces are shared spaces

All companies have a legal responsibility to identify risks for their employees – to isolate, eliminate, or otherwise minimise the risk they pose.

What is striking is that this is done by each company in almost complete isolation, either on paper forms, or on an app that emulates a paper form.

Companies rarely share data with one another, and when they do it’s in an indigestible format that ensures that nobody really benefits.

When you consider how many companies share geography, this situation is ridiculous.

Take a port as an example. Any large port will have upwards of 100 companies all working in the same environment, identifying many of the same hazards, but they will often find and document these hazards independently.

By contrast, when risk information is shared, the number of people that experience unrecorded risks can be significantly reduced.

It is our hypothesis at ThunderMaps that being aware of something dangerous is the first step to avoiding it.

Reason 2: The administration load is too high to tackle alone

Warning staff and keeping them safe is very time consuming.

There is simply too much risk and too much danger for any business to do an effective job at documenting everything.

And where exactly does the responsibility of each business start and end?

The administrative load on each individual business is far too high to do an effective job.

And the weight of evidence suggests that although businesses are legally impelled to try to keep their people safe, they are failing (2.3 million people still die every year).

Everywhere you go you experience danger.

But we can’t protect you from every little thing! Can we. Can we?

We humans are good at spotting danger, but from time to time we fail.

And the consequences of this failure can be very serious (870,000 injury causing accidents happen at work every day).

This is one reason why we’ve just launched Proximity Alerts, a feature that sends users an alert when they are approaching something which will put them in danger.

Health and safety should be about more than just a business collecting information and ticking boxes.

It should be about using that information to make people demonstrably safer.

If a truly comprehensive safety system is simply too difficult for any business to do a great job alone, why not share the load by sharing risks?

Reason 3: Technology can help dramatically

Much of the risk data that a business needs to collect, store and warn staff about is already recorded elsewhere. 

For example, in the last few weeks alone, dozens of hazard data-feeds have been added into ThunderMaps.

Why would you re-record something when it’s already recorded, and some of your safety obligations as a business can be taken care of automatically? 

In addition to the information that companies and their users collect and share on ThunderMaps, we also collect and share every single piece of public risk data that our agents find – from fires to car crashes, earthquakes to civil defence warnings.

All information is seamlessly integrated so that our users are made aware of the things that might represent a risk to their safety.

ThunderMaps is building the largest database of dangerous locations in the world.

We are doing this so that we can warn people when they approach danger at work.

Because when your staff have accurate information about the risks they face, they can mitigate and avoid the danger.

When they don’t, they can’t.

If you want to keep your people safe at work, and reduce the administrative load that your business is experiencing at the same time, then get in contact with one of our account managers today!