There are many ways to populate and manage the data in a well-designed employee notification system. One option is complete internal management, where employees have no access to their contact profiles and the information contained within. The company has an internal system that hopefully has contact information, and they load the data into the notification system. Employees are never provided access to those profiles.
Another is complete external control where employees sign up and then subsequently manage their own profiles on an ongoing basis and the company doesn’t need to do anything in the way of management, other than to cajole the few stragglers. And even that problem solves itself after the first notification where reticent employees don’t get their notification.
And of course, systems such as AMG Alerts allow for hybrids of these two approaches. Where an initial upload is possible and the employees then are granted access for any change in assumptions or to address wrong or missing information.
Proponents of the complete internal approach usually say things line “we want this data to reside in one place. We can’t let the employee have control because he might change something.(!)” The frequency with which we hear that is alarming and disappointing. It seems that they are missing the ultimate point of the system, which is to effectively communicate in situations that involve safety or at the very least, convenience of their employees. It is not primarily about keeping perfectly aligned databases. That detail may be accomplished at a more leisurely pace because it is NOT critical.
As much as we hear disrespectful talk about employees and their lack of capability and potentially hostile motivations, we question the basis for these thoughts in many cases. You will virtually ALWAYS have a better system – for the purposes of emergency notification – if you involve employees and let them easily change their information and their preferences as they see fit. With AMG Alerts, they just click their own key link to do this. They are more likely to take a second to do that than they are to “contact HR if there are any changes”. Half of the time, they don’t know if there are any any changes because they aren’t even sure how their profile is set up and what’s in there!