WATMOS Community Homes is an organisation dedicated to building affordable and safe neighbourhoods at a local level. The company owns almost 2,700 homes located in the West Midlands and Lambeth, London.
About Company
WATMOS Community Homes was formed in March 2003, when eight tenant management organisations in Walsall transferred out of local authority control to form the Association.
The wide and varied work WATMOS does as a charitable housing association means it must have access to reliable, effective lone worker solutions to keep their employees safe while they are working.
Many of WATMOS’ key frontline staff are lone workers, with some also required to work late into the evening or night. This brings with it additional health and safety challenges that must be overcome in order to ensure the wellbeing of these employees.
With so many staff working alone late into the night in one way or another, the company needs to be able to monitor and ensure the safety of everyone from cleaners to housing staff.
What were their goals?
The company’s previous provider supplied employees with ID badges that were unfortunately unfit for purpose. Whether it was Man Down sensors being activated too easily or limitations in the way they could be worn, workers responded negatively to them.
These design and functionality limitations led to the devices not being used. This creates two problems—the business’s return on investment is unfulfilled, and workers are left unprotected because of a device they find too difficult to use.
This is common in the industry but does not always serve customers or end-users who are subsequently tied to a system that may not work for them.
Additional costs for mobile workforce management systems, which allow the lone worker alarms to feedback valuable location data that can be used for things such as actionable reports, were also a problem for the organisation, who wanted a solution that came ready to use.
Finally, like almost every business across the world in 2020, WATMOS saw a dramatic shift in their normal patterns of working. This did not just impact the company’s existing lone workers, but also those who had previously worked alongside colleagues.
With this new mode of working predicted to continue, WATMOS have more lone workers than previously. This means that their solutions must be usable in a multitude of different contexts and environments.
What did they do?
With our lone worker devices, all of WATMOS’ lone workers benefit from the security of being in reach of assistance whenever they need it.
When employees are alone late at night they are more at risk of being confronted, threatened or attacked either during their shift or even on their route home, but lone worker devices give them peace of mind that, should an incident occur, they can simply hit the SOS button and be put in contact with the right person straight away.
There’s also the risk of accidents happening whilst employees are alone, and Vatix’s lone worker alarms come with a Man Down feature as standard. This can detect when the user has fallen and may have become incapacitated.
WATMOS combined these lone worker devices with the entire Protector™ system, which is one of the only lone worker service providers that does not offer multiple-year contracts as standard. This solution does not shackle WATMOS to long contracts that remove responsibility from the provider, leaving the quality of the customer service and the solution to speak for itself.
Results
Our devices coupled with the Protector™ platform have helped WATMOS give their workers more security and protection, whether they have always worked alone or have found themselves working without their colleagues for the first time.
“For me, it was the whole package, with the system also letting you see where employees are. I don’t think our previous provider had that at the time. Or they had it at an extra cost. Vatix’s system came as part and parcel. That’s what made me interested.”
Raj Kaur
Human Resources Officer
