I'm a manufacturing and distribution company's Senior Director of Operational Risk and Strategy. Anything related to technological or safety risks runs through my team.
We use Mass Notification to provide alerts about extreme weather events. We're located in the mid-Atlantic region, so hurricanes are common, but we also use it for ice storms, snow, tornadoes, etc. We use Everbridge to send notifications to our teammates and ask them about their status.
For example, we send follow-up questions to impacted teammates, asking them, "Hey, do you need anything? Do you need help? Can we reach out to you?" The tool enables two-way communication. In the past few years, we've also used Everbridge to complete daily check-ins for COVID-19. Some of our facilities are high-density, so we wanted to make sure that we ask questions about symptoms before our employees come to work. It was just a simple "yes" or "no" question that allowed us to understand the employee's health status. We were sending thousands of messages every day.
The third use case would be any emergency, such as a security threat. We can use Everbridge to inform employees of an event that may impact them, such as a protest or a shooting. We might send out a message telling them to avoid the area.
Everbridge allows us to protect our most important asset: our employees. We must protect the people who make deliveries for us, sell our products, work in our facilities, or come to an office. Without a tool like Everbridge, we have no way to communicate with a large number of people in seconds. Some employees don't have direct access to company-based email, but they usually have personal devices. Some of them have company devices, but many do not. The vast majority do not have company devices, so we use Everbridge Mass Notification to communicate with them directly.
My team's mission is to minimize risks to our facilities and people. We protect our people, care for them, and check on them to ensure they're okay during a crisis. Doing this also helps grow our bottom line because we can avoid paying large claims to impacted teammates.
In general, employee safety creates massive value for our organization. If we prioritize employee safety from top to bottom, it affects productivity, morale, and turnover. We're retaining employees because people want to work for an organization that cares about them.
It sends a message to a frontline teammate that the company cares enough to communicate with them even though we don't directly benefit financially from it. We're asking about their well-being and their families during an emergency. Everbridge allows us to fulfill that vision through a simple communication tool. It enables us to build a safety culture throughout our organization.
While Everbridge hasn't affected my productivity personally, it was helpful during COVID. We could communicate from a high level when teammates were quarantined or symptomatic to recalibrate and adjust at each location. Aside from that, I don't think it has affected productivity per se.
Everbridge helped us save time when we send out communications. Before we had Everbridge, we had to use call trees and spreadsheets to contact each employee one by one to check on them. When a storm came through, we had supervisors pull up the spreadsheet and call. Using Everbridge, we can quickly send a notification, and everybody gets it simultaneously. Everybody can respond or acknowledge that they received it within a couple of seconds.