Virtual In/Out Board

New Features: Lone Worker GPS tracking

Posted: 3/6/2019

For a while now we've had free Late Alerts to notify you if an employee doesn't return when they said they would. This is great in low-risk situations, but sometimes you need to keep even closer tabs on where your staff are and if they are OK, particularly if they are performing hazardous tasks away from the office.

You can pay lots of money for 3rd party "Lone Worker" apps, but by popular request we've built our own system integrated seamlessly into our In/Out Board. This is a "Premium" feature with extra costs (see below), but will probably be more cost effective than most alternatives.

How do the Lone Worker features work?

This is a brand new feature and we haven't written our help pages for it yet, but it should be fairly simple:

First head to the Company Settings / Features page to enable the Lone Worker features.
Then head to the Lone Workers / Tasks page to create some tasks. Lone Worker tasks have a "Check-in Interval" - if the Lone Worker doesn't "Check-In" within this interval then their Supervisor is notified. So, for example, if working at the top of a turbine in the middle of a wind-farm, you might want the employee to check-in every 30 minutes to let you know they are safe.
Then head to the Lone Workers / Setting page to create some Supervisors and change other settings:
- Since you are charged for each Lone Worker, you can restrict this feature to certain staff or teams.
- The Supervisor can be immediately notified when a Lone Worker starts a task.
- GPS can be enabled so Supervisors can see the location of Lone Workers (only while they are performing a task).
Then a Lone Worker needs to start a task. They do this just as they would set a location for being "Out", except now as well as having a list of previous locations they can also see the Lone Worker tasks.
While performing the task, the user sees this:
The Lone Worker will receive a notification reminding them to check-in before the timer is up.
If they fail to check-in then a notification (or sms or email) is sent to the Supervisor. Since this is a safety feature you can define multiple Supervisors - if the first Supervisor on the list doesn't acknowledge the notification then the second Supervisor on the list is notified, etc.
If they press the SOS button then ALL Supervisors are immediately sent notifications, sms messages (if using SMS Features) AND email.

How much does it cost?

Our Lone Worker features cost only USD 5 per active Lone Worker per month. Yes, unlike other apps we only charge for active lone workers in any month, which we think is fairer if you don't use these features very often but want them available when you need them.

Can I have a free trial?

Of course you can - no one likes paying for things without trying them first, right! Once you enable the Lone Worker features you have one month to try them. Feel free to let as many of your staff use it as often as you like. Your next monthly subscription payment will not include any Lone Worker charge, and after one month of trialling the features your Active Lone Worker count will be reset to zero. We'll send you an email to let you know that the free trial is over and that new Lone Worker activity will count towards the next subscription payment.

This is a brand new feature and we'd love to get your feedback on it. We're happy to make it work as effectively as possible for everyone.

2. Automatically set users "Out" at midnight

If users are forgetting to sign out at the end of the day and our Sign-Out Reminder feature isn't working for everyone then you might want to try our "Set everyone 'Out' at midnight" feature - in the Company Settings / Teams page, under "Setting Status"

It does exactly what it says. Simple.

3. Easier switching between two teams

If you have the 'Visitors' feature enabled it's always been easy to switch back to the Visitors page from any Team page.

With this update, if you don't have Visitors enabled and you have only two teams, then there will always be a handy link to the other team at the top of the page (unless you've hidden the header). If you're using a shared kiosk account in your reception area then this can make things a bit quicker for your staff.

That's it for this update. We have a few other helpful additions coming up in the near future so we'll keep you posted...