3 Ways Your Field Service Business Can Satisfy Rules and Regulations

In August 2021, we engaged Opinium — a research consultancy —  to survey field service organisations and learn about how they fared in the year since the UK’s strictest lockdown ended.

Did you know that 53% of field service leaders said breached compliance requirements harmed their business over the last year? With rules and regulations constantly updating, it can be tricky to keep up-to-date. But, in a post-pandemic world, organisations can’t afford to be complacent if they are to bounce back stronger than before. 

That’s why we’ve put together this helpful guide, which will share some ways you can guarantee your business is always meeting rules and regulations. Read on to learn more.

How Do I Ensure My Business is Meeting Rules and Regulations?

1. Conduct Risk Assessments

Health and safety procedures in the workplace are a must-have for any business to remain compliant. Around 693,000 people sustain an injury at work each year in the UK, but if your company is found to be responsible, there could be hefty fines to pay.

Fortunately, keeping your engineers safe on the job needn’t be an impossible task. When you use job management software to manage your operations, you can provide your field-based workers with an app that enables cross-communication between them and your back-office staff.

As such, you can set mandatory risk assessments that engineers must complete on their mobile devices before starting work or filling out timesheets. Then, should your workers encounter a potential hazard, they can send an alert to your back office. The alert allows your team to work together and mitigate the problem, getting the work back on track without delay.

Not only do risk assessments prevent jobs from coming to a halt, but they also give you peace of mind that your technicians are working safely and to industry standards.

2. Handle Customers’ Information Properly

Shockingly, 52% of businesses aren’t GDPR compliant, putting them at serious risk of operational, financial and reputational damage. Worse still, the chance of inadvertently breaching regulations increases as companies expand rapidly — so how can you ensure your customers’ data is always kept safe?

The best way to handle customer data and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands is by investing in robust, cloud-based software. BigChange’s complete job management platform secures all data in AWS (Amazon Web Services), the world’s most comprehensive and widely-used cloud system. 

The cloud encrypts all sensitive information — meaning it won’t be vulnerable to hackers — and creates backups, so you never have to worry about system crashes. As a result, you and your customers can rest assured that their information won’t be subject to a breach.

3. Monitor Employees’ Working Hours

Approximately 44% of businesses struggle with timesheet errors on a weekly or daily basis. Aside from creating more time-consuming admin, mistakes can give you an inaccurate record of working hours, so you can’t ensure your operatives have been working within legal limits.

When you digitise your timesheets and allow employees to fill them out via their smart devices, they can easily log their start and finish, breaks, and travel times throughout the day. The central job management system then reconciles employees’ data against detailed vehicle tracking reports and time-stamped records of job activities. Consequently, you’ll have an extensive, accurate record of each workers’ day and can ensure that their working hours are compliant with the law. 

Remove the Headache of Meeting Compliances with a Job Management Platform

In the last 12 months, more than half of the field service businesses caught out for breaching rules ended up paying a fine, losing work or suffering reputational harm. Such severe consequences are not ideal for companies that need to bounce back from the already damaging effects of the pandemic.

Therefore, you must modernise your data protection and workplace safety procedures to make them simpler to manage. With BigChange’s field service management software, you’ll have access to the following:

• DVSA-compliant vehicle checks
• Driver behaviour analysis
• Risk assessments and method statements
• Resource profiles that show technicians’ working hours
• Secure customer records

Make rules and regulations a priority with state-of-the-art technology, and you’ll never have to worry about the harsh penalties of non-compliance.

Health and Safety Procedures in the Workplace are Prioritised on BigChange

The BigChange complete job management platform is helping field service businesses across the UK win more work, take control of their operations and deliver winning customer experiences.

Bring your customer relationship management (CRM), job scheduling,   live tracking, field resource management, health and safety procedures, financial management and business intelligence onto one easy-to-use platform and begin enjoying the benefits of a smarter way of working today.

Want to find out more?

Discover how your business can grow stronger on BigChange here and arrange a free demo today.

Get the full State of the Field Service Sector report here. Also read 6 facilities management legislations you should know about.