How McDonalds and Coles are using Aussie tech to combat worker violence

When we started Duress, we had no idea that five years later Australia’s biggest corporates would be using our tech to keep their staff safe.

We had been building Duress with the goal of allowing family and domestic violence victims to quickly and discretely request police. We worked with @VicPol over 9 months on designing a quick, reliable mechanism that could generate a priority response, in a form that would be available to most people, an app on the phone. We released the app, and had an overwhelming response from people all across Australia.

We then started getting calls from real-estate agents, like @Ray White and @Biggin Scott. They were noticing a trend where some of their property managers were being harassed, and they wanted to provide our solution to them. After some discussions it turned out that the property managers being harassed were usually young woman, who would put a photo of themselves on realestate.com, advertising they would be at this location, at this time, alone, for an open inspection.

We enhanced the app to allow users to “check in”, which would mark that they had arrived at a house, and if they were there too long, to raise an alert. We also added the ability for the realestate to sync a list of all of their properties to our platform, and so we could automatically check people in and out, meaning they didn’t have to remember to check in.

This automatic checkin in system was noticed by other organisations who also do home visits. Within 12 months organisations across Australia such as @Mission Australia, @BaptCare, @Silverchain, @Royal Flying Doctors, @Salvation Army, @Red Nose and more deployed our app onto their staff phones, to ensure that the teams were arriving safely each day.

@Salvation Army pointed out that their users wanted to be able to leave feedback, and so we added the ability for users to mark a location as having dogs, or the client has knives, or to avoid the carpark. This review system allowed organisations to have a constant eye on the safety concerns of their teams. The safety alert was also displayed to any user who visited that location, so as soon as they got out of the car, their phone would chime and say “Checking you in at 11 Main St, we will check in on you in an hour. Your team have reported dogs in this location”.

This safety updates were a critical measure in keeping users safe, and after releasing it we were approached by the councils near us here in Melbourne to deploy to their local laws and maternal child heath teams, such as @Melbourne City Council , @City of Casey, @Cardinia Council, @Baw Baw Council, @Maroondah Council etc.

Then councils from other states began deploying, throughout Queensland, NSW and WA. A few months later, @Department of Justice @Department of Families, @Department of Health all deployed, with @Department of Defence and @department of Premier and Cabinet, @Department of Land and Housing all following later that year.

All of these deployments gave us incredible insight into the issues organisations were facing - they desperately wanted to keep their teams safe in the face of increasing threats and violence, and they wanted a simple, reliable system that wouldn’t impact the teams day to day work.

Working with these organisations allows us to continue to craft incredible technology to keep their teams safe, from our Halo rings for DV, to our Phoenix cards with safety alerts, to live bushfire and flood status safety checks.

Over the last 2 years, the retail and hospitality industry is seeing an increase in violence to their teams, and the data shows that it is the younger generation, particular females, being targeted the most, with increasing numbers reporting they are being verbally abused, physically abused and sexually assaulted at work by customers.

Australia’s biggest retailers have zero tolerance for any abuse toward their team members or customers, and we have seen our incredible safety tech being deployed to safety focused companies like @Coles, @McDonalds, @Cotton On, @Office works etc.

The safety devices not only keep the staff safe allowing them to urgently request police, but we are seeing more and more examples where the tech has been used to keep customers safe as well, with team members activating the devices to urgently request an ambulance for customers with medical emergencies.

We are honoured to be working alongside amazing organisations across Australia, and building upon the learnings from different areas, such as family violence, to real estate, to government, and now to retail,  allows us to continue creating incredible tech right here in Australia, and continue keeping people safe.

We have a jam packed lineup of new technology we can’t wait to reveal in Feb, including a brand new category defining product, Eagle, as well as the next iteration of Safety Product of the Year (2023), Phoenix 2, as well as the reveal of Duress Comms.

Thanks

Trav