Employee Notification Systems and “Apps”

Posted by Dave Burr on June 28, 2012
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The six-word combination most heard by developers is “Is there an app for that?” And why not – there is an app for everything else. Many companies are desperate to come out with an “app” and boy, does it show. A major insurance company that has an “app” that will allow you to take a picture of your car and then, if you punch another button, type in your VIN? Yep that’s it…but it’s an app!

Another major insurance company just launched an app that allows you to “diagram your latest accident.” Wow.

Our view is that a mobile web site is better than, say, a native iPhone app, and that is the approach we take with AMG Alerts. With a native app, you need to occasionally update it if the publisher adds functionality (as they should) and you don’t want to have to do this in a time-sensitive situations. A mobile site never needs to be “updated” by the client. And you still get your icon on the phone.

Another trend that affects how solutions are deployed is the rise in popularity of tablets. There used to be two categories of Internet-enabled devices – the “smartphone” and the full-blown desktop or notebook computer. Now that landscape is changing rapidly and the more portable tablet is eating away at the full-blown computer share. Some experts expect the normal “computer” to go the way of the dinosaur in less than two years in favor of tablets. That seems far-fetched, especially to us IT-types, but there is no denying the explosion in tablet rollouts, and they are not toys anymore. We do see that in two years, most computer users will have a tablet as an adjunct to replacement for their normal PC/Mac.  All of us already know people whose total computer needs can be, and are,  satisfied with a tablet. This trend also falls in favor of a mobile web site solution.

A well-designed notification solution should be as device-independent as possible so it is accessible by all the new hardware coming out, and in this day and age, web access is ubiquitous and becoming only more so

Employee Notification System – Should I Issue the “All Clear?”

Posted by Dave Burr on June 20, 2012
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Some of our potential AMG Alerts employee notification customers have expressed that, as a matter of policy, they feel it is not necessary to issue “all clear” alerts indicating the resolution of a situation. This may be due to an effort to save a few dollars, or to not “bother” people.

Our view is that in most cases, it needs to be done, but certainly not always.

If the notification indicates a situation where a disruption is occurring and will continue until an all clear is issued, make sure you do it. A common one is an IT system failure. If the “ASCE System” is down, make sure you issue an all clear when it’s back up because otherwise employees will be either not doing their work on an otherwise functional system, or pinging the system constantly to see if it is back up. This is a waste of resources that generally far exceeds the cost of a broadcast message.

Another common situation is safety related – bomb scares, intruders, etc. You need to call the situation clear otherwise it is too disruptive to the organization.

Weather alerts are a mixed bag. It is generally not necessary to issue an all clear because employees can judge when the situation has passed. Some companies might feel that there is some legal liability incurred by telling employees that there is no remaining danger with something as unpredictable as weather.  In tornado alley, for example, the sirens go off to alert you to danger, but they don’t tell you that everything is safe again. This sets a precedent in these areas.

The exception to that is, again, when the warning results in a disruption. If there is a policy in place where construction workers leave a work site when they receive a high wind warning, you have to let them know when, per your policy, it is safe to return. If a tornado warning causes employees to retreat to a safe area where they can no longer assess the weather situation on their own, you’ll need to help them with that.

Other, more mundane notifications generally don’t require an all clear. If the power is out in a commercial real estate situation, for example, you may or may not issue an all clear depending on what you believe your tenants to be doing as a result. Just like parking lot repaving or air conditioner repair, it is usually obvious when then situation is resolved.

Emergency Notification System Event Management

Posted by Dave Burr on May 25, 2012
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Our prospective customers planning to implement AMG Alerts as a tool to handle unforeseen situations at events often state “I am not sure how effective this will be if most people don’t sign up.”

Our viewpoint is the following:

  • In almost every case, most people will NOT sign up, so plan on that
  • In almost every case, the system will be effective anyway

It’s unreasonable to think that in an event where there might be 5,000, 10,000, or 50,000 people attending that most people attendees sign up for emergency alerts of some kind. Many won’t know about the availability of alerts, many won’t care, and many will figure that the odds of needing it are too slim to bother with it. You could easily end up with 5% participation, at best. And that’s okay.

In this vein, here are a couple of anecdotes that come to mind:

1)      In the fall of 2010, Purdue basketball forward Robbie Hummel tore his ACL on the first day of basketball practice. This happened mid-morning on a football Saturday at Purdue. Within an hour, 30,000 tailgaters in their various designated areas, spread over 2,500 acres of campus, knew about this. I’m sure it spread even more quickly among the student population on campus. And at game time, all 60,000 people in the stadium knew about it. I witnessed the phenomenon from a tailgater’s perspective and wondered what tiny percentage of the 30,000 people INITIALLY heard the news and how it could have spread like wildfire. At the end of the day, all it takes a lot of people who are interested in the issue and a few people to ignite the fire within various densely-packed pockets.

 2)      In the spring of 2011, I was at the second-largest aviation event in the U.S., the annual Sun ‘n’ Fun Fly-In in Lakeland, FL. A violent storm with embedded tornadoes swept across the event, damaging or destroying dozens of aircraft, flooding the area, knocking out power, and basically making a mess of the event. Nobody is knocking the lack of preparation on the part of the organizers, especially because they learned from that event, but it resulted in hours of chaos. None of the attendees, spread over an area about 10% of that in the Purdue example above, knew that they were trying to shut down the event and in fact clear everyone out to begin a massive cleanup operation of spilled porta-potties and aviation fuel, wrecked airplanes, and the like. I was there for that too and as people crammed into one of the many pole buildings trying to hear a guy on a megaphone standing on an emergency vehicle, I thought of how quickly word would spread if just 50 or 100 people out of 10,000 had known what the organizers had been trying to do.

So besides the obvious PR aspects of providing emergency notification, be aware that it only takes a small spark to start wildfire, and it might not matter much how big the spark is compared to the size of the field.

Text Notification System – Sign Up Via Short Code?

Posted by Dave Burr on May 7, 2012
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Text Notification System – Signing Up Via Text

We do get the question occasionally; “can our employees just text ‘Acme Widget Company’ to your short code and sign up for our system?” While we can do that with AMG Alerts, it has a few downsides – most of which are significant:

1)      Text notification is indeed very fast and convenient, but if I am allowed to back out of the premise completely for a second – not everyone has that capability for various reasons and there needs to be a way to accommodate other methods. (maybe this should be a footnote as opposed to a list item!)

2)      If someone just sends SMS to a short code, all you’ll know about them is their phone number. That isn’t a very good way of establishing a comprehensive communications system. Of course you could then get the rest of the information through a serious of SMS exchanges, but that would be cumbersome to the point of being silly.

3)   In normal applications of texting in an employee messaging scenario, phone interaction instructions take up valuable character real estate. Remember, the length of SMS messages is limited.

The bottom line is that texting keywords to short code for system signup, while often appropriate, especially in marketing or short-term campaigns, wouldn’t generally be part of a critical notification system solution.

Mass Notification System Response Capability

Posted by Dave Burr on May 7, 2012
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Do you need “response” capability in your employee notification system? Most situations are dealt with using one-way broadcasts. There is seldom a need for people to affirmatively reply.

Many people wonder “how do I know if people received the message if they don’t reply?” This is a legitimate question that has complex answers:

  • If you require people to reply simply to say that they have received the message, many –if not most – will not, especially if there is no clear need to. Then what? Send it again? And then again? There is (or should be) a clear difference between the type of situation wherein a person is asked to reply – in any form – and one that doesn’t. Most do not. You should choose a system that has some built-in disposition reporting so that you at least know how good your information is (the delivery rate) and thus the likelihood that people received it.
  • While some systems like AMG Alerts do have a built-in response capability that can be selectively deployed, it may not be necessary to use your mass notification system partner’s capabilities. It is easy enough, in a real emergency, to simply add as part of the message “employees are asked to contact their supervisors” or some such solution.

When a response is not solicited in every message, messages that ASK for it are bound to stand out. In fact, some of these nuances in the use of emergency notification systems will be covered in other articles, as well be full-on business continuity applications wherein we do recommend response capability be put in place through your system, whether it be AMG Alerts or something else.

Employee Notification System Establishment of Buy-In

Posted by Dave Burr on May 7, 2012
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“Employees are like people.”

Yes, I did hear someone say this once. And they are right! People tend to go their own direction based on their own instincts and conditioning. Yes, if someone works for you, you can make certain “demands”, but that only will take you so far.

In our implementations of AMG Alerts among our corporate customers, there is often a concern about how all the contact profiles will be collected. While some companies have significant contact information and can upload it into our system (perhaps as an initial “seeding” step), often, it’s more effective if the employee accesses our system directly to establish certain preferences.

So how do you establish buy-in and get maximum participation?

1)      Set up the system correctly.  Don’t make the people who DO jump into it have to go back and input information you forgot to collect

2)      Communicate effectively. Beyond  “we have this new notification system”, tell everyone what it is for, how often they can expect to get messages and when you will and WON’T use it. And if you can point to one or two example of when it would have come in handy, be sure to do that! Most of our AMG Alerts customers come to us because they have more than one great example of when it would have come in handy!

3)      Establish deadlines for sign-up based on realistic goals. Publish the first one. Maybe it’s a week or so out. Then go back out and publish the next one, giving just a few days.

4)      Be patient. If you don’t have 100% participation, all it takes is the first “situation” to occur where the system gets used. You’ll pick up the stragglers at that time.

We’ve never had an employer fail to be successful in implementing the system – even before the emergency occurs, because our customers have been creative thinkers. And of course once it’s used once, everyone else falls into place.