Blogging for Safety

When a Gale GFS employee first logs on to his computer, he sees a welcome screen filled with company news and announcements, similar to countless other corporate intranet sites. Gale GFS’s, however, has a small box in the upper left-hand corner: the Incident Reporting System. Depending on the employee’s location, that box may contain information on power outages, fires or impending hurricanes. Like a journal or blog, the entries track developments and conversations between employees.

For example, a property manager in Houston logged on to the IRS on Sept. 23, 2005, alerting employees in the area as Hurricane Rita approached. The subsequent back and forth between the property manager and other employees chronicles the weather reports and developing plans to secure property and account for employees. Each time an alert was placed on the intranet site, employees were notified on their mobile devices and via e-mail.

Each case or incident is archived in the system so that others can retrieve them from the database in order to study them. "From reading and analyzing the information, we can gather best practices and bring them back to the company as a whole," says Chris Furlong, manager of education and training for Gale GFS. Each session, however, is available for viewing only by the employees working with a specific client so as to maintain security. For example, if an AT&T site experiences a power outage, only Gale employees working on that account (and, of course, their client, AT&T) will be able to see what’s going on. Furlong says that new employees can be trained on the system in 10 minutes.

Before the IRS system was developed, employees had to stay on the phone for long stretches in order to stay up to date, says William Mellin, a Gale GFS VP. With the IRS, people can do their job while they check the site, or get information via handheld devices. "It’s more productive to have people working than tied to a conference call or webcast," Mellin adds.
Messineo also says that before the IRS, e-mails between employees created a "spider web" in which messages crossed each other, and made it hard to make sure who was speaking to whom and when.

People Versus Property

When the London bombs went off, Marlow was watching the early morning news on TV at his home in New Jersey. He immediately picked up the phone. Within minutes an incident report was opened on the company intranet and Marlow had accounted for the safety of the top four executives in the region, including McCrae, who had provided the initial information to a colleague in France. Then McCrae got in touch by phone with the manager of Gale GFS’s account with GlaxoSmithKline, one of its largest clients in the London area, who was able to log on to the intranet and account for all employees at those London facilities through the IRS.