Location, Location, Location
The Surprising Power of What3Words in Workplace Health & Safety.
Most of us probably take for granted our awareness of our location, whether its where we live, our workplace, or the range of other places that we visit as we go about our daily routine. We manage to navigate to and around these areas with minimal conscious effort, though what happens when we need to guide someone to one of these locations for the first time? Pinpointing a specific location can be trickier than it seems, and even more so when we need to guide someone to us in an emergency situation, when time is of the essence.
With a staggering level of free to access apps and technology readily available on our mobile devices, there is a range of useful tools which can be used to keep ourselves and our colleagues safe whilst we are at work. If we need to quickly identify our location and share this information with a third party, such as in the event of an emergency, then What3Words is an invaluable tool to have at your disposal.
The app is provided free of charge and utilises GPS to pinpoint your device’s location on a map that has been subdivided into 57 trillion 3-metre by 3-metre squares, each of which has a unique 3-word name.
Therefore, regardless of whether you are on your living room sofa, in your local supermarket, or at the summit of Mount Everest, your specific square can be easily found.
For example, the What3Words for The London Eye is bikes.audio.half and can be found in seconds by searching on the app or website.
The ability to accurately pinpoint your location to within a few metres has a number of powerful uses in everyday life, but also in our health & safety compliance at work. Imagine the amount of time that can be saved on a 999 call if the description of your location can be pared down to a mere three words. As of September 2021, more than 85% of British emergency services teams are using the app, so you can be assured they’ll be able to find their way to you quickly. With that in mind, imagine if the What3Words code for your workplace’s front door was incorporated into your emergency plans, fire risk assessments and first aid assessments - the amount of time that can be saved is enormous, and help can be directed to your exact location.
Its one thing to direct the emergency services to your workplace, but what if you work on a very large site, such as a factory or a quarry? What about expansive university campuses with multitudes of buildings?
This is where the app can be particularly useful, as there will obviously be a great number of named squares within your premises. If you can identify the name of the square in which your emergency is taking place (or as near as possible), then the service personnel can be quickly and accurately directed to your location.
Lone Working is another traditionally tricky area of health & safety compliance where the app can be particularly useful, especially where you may have mobile employees frequently driving between different sites. Should a vehicle break down or be involved in a collision, then your whereabouts can be quickly identified and, as the app utilises GPS, it is not reliant on a mobile signal - which can be patchy in some of the more remote rural areas of the UK.
Where workers do become stranded in an area with poor or no mobile signal, customers have previously asked me how they can then summon help - they can use What3Words to identify where they are, but its not much use if they can’t call anyone to tell them about it! Many of us may know that making emergency calls through 999 or 112 doesn’t necessarily need mobile signal from your specific network, as your device will try to use any available signal to connect the call. However, fewer people may know about the 999 SMS service. In a few simple steps you can register your mobile phone to send text messages to the emergency services. Screenshots from What3Words can simply be shared straight to a text message and sent directly to the emergency services. This is really helpful if you’re in a tight spot and your mobile battery is running low, or equally if you’re in an situation where it might not be safe to talk.
Its clear that being able to quickly identify and share the details of your location provides a number of advantages in ensuring we stay safe and work, and that, when we need their assistance, the emergency services can locate us without delay.
The app certainly isn’t without its shortcomings; the use of English language words is not as culturally neutral as using numbers. However, the greatest risk comes from the mishearing or misspelling of words when speaking to others over the phone (how many of us have mixed up our ‘s’ and ‘f’ when listening to someone give us information over the phone?), as this could direct assistance to another location some distance away from our emergency. Some evidence also points to similar sounding What3Words codes being physically close together, which can also lead to some confusion.
However, despite these shortcomings, we have a powerful tool at our disposal which has a number of practical uses in supporting our workplace fire safety, first aid, lone working and emergency procedures.
If ADC Training Limited can be of any assistance in supporting your health & safety compliance, including any of the areas discussed above, please don’t hesitate to contact us.