Unite Students promoting a positive safety culture

Unite Students is the UK’s longest established, private landlord for people in higher education. Creating places through the delivery of purpose-built student accommodation, it has provided a home for over 600,000 people since forming in 1992. The company now employs more than 1400 staff – people with a passion for creating great environments, to help their residents settle into new surroundings, whilst providing security and support where needed.

A significant number of Unite Students’ workforce can potential work alone, and/or out of hours, at night and weekends. As well as this, they have roles that are spread across campuses and throughout the city, and duties including student welfare issues, checking buildings and communal areas, and even discussion around debt arrears. Therefore, it’s clear that Unite Students needed a solution in place to ensure their employees were protected and felt empowered.

After speaking with their employees Unite Students discovered their workforce could, at times, feel intimidated, scared and had faced anti-social and threatening situations whilst at work. Being a company that takes the safety of their employees extremely seriously they immediately began searching for a solution.

Matt Perks, Unite Students City Manager explains, “If it gets out of hand then it’s really important that our employees have excellent support and they can get hold of the local police, if and should they need to, but also that they feel safe when doing so. The SoloProtect solution offers exactly that; a discreet device that allows our employees to carry out their duties with peace of mind. On top of this, the service we’ve received from SoloProtect on a whole has been brilliant.’ 

SoloProtect is the international lone worker safety company – working with thousands of customers across the UK, US, and mainland Europe. The company works alongside employers to help them reduce social and physical risk to personnel, and financial risk to their organisation. SoloProtect has supplied Unite Students for a decade, and recently delivered a significant number of new SoloProtect Go devices for their lone working employees.

SoloProtect Go was announced to the market in 2018. It is a small and discreet, fob style lone worker device – and is supported by SoloProtect’s 24/7, EN 50518 accredited Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC). This enables a lone worker to raise a ‘Red Alert’ at the push of a button, making a call directly from their lone worker device, into the ARC, for prompt verification, and escalation – appropriately, and in line with any incident taking place.

It’s important to protect your staff no matter how big or small your company is, and Unite Students does everything possible to meet the required duty of care to its workforce. Unite Students strongly believe in safeguarding the wellbeing of all of their employees, including those that work alone which is why they’ve invested in a SoloProtect lone worker solution.    

This new tranche of devices also features as the basis for a new video case-study developed in collaboration with Unite Students. It showcases how they are equipping employees to help ensure people residing in a Unite Students environment, can be safe and secure. It also highlights Unite Students’ commitment to both their employees and customers, by actively looking to equip personnel and empower them to cope with the demands of their job role. You can view the video below.