How Notification Emails and Texts Work

Notifications from PeopleSafe are sent to users by either email or text message.  Their purpose is to let you know something has happened or needs doing and to direct you to the software to find out the detail or to take action straight away if something is serious. If you were to receive for example, a StoryAnywhere email notification, the detail would be found in a StoryAnywhere task found under StoryAnywhere Tasks in the Stories dashboard of your PeopleSafe account. This is how we help you keep track of what is happening around safety in your business. 

In this article:

Notifications and Profiles

Whether you receive a notification or not is determined by two things; the information in your Staff Profile and the settings in the profile of the Organisation you are connected to. It’s really important when setting up your Organisation in PeopleSafe and adding staff members as PeopleSafe users, that profiles are set up correctly so that people will receive the notifications you want them to receive.  These settings can of course be updated at any stage as circumstances change.

Staff Profile

Fields in a Staff Profile that determine notifications

Security clearance

Your security clearance effects what notifications you will receive. Standard Staff clearance for example will receive notifications about training and meetings or actions that need doing. A person with Manage Users clearance will receive notifications about staff they manage and will include for example StoryAnywhere notifications or notifications about a new risk. PeopleSafeCoodinators receive all notifications about everything by default. For a full list of Notifications that are sent from PeopleSafe :  Notification table

Best contact and work email addresses

There are two places in a Staff Profile to add an email address. Under contact details, the best contact email here allows users to receive notifications about licenses about to expire, password resets and connect requests. The work email in the organisation details section is where notifications to do with the organisation you are connected to are sent. For example, training required.  For  PeopleSafe Coordinators and Manage Users  this is the email you will receive Story and Serious Harm notifications.  If these fields are empty or you have changed your email address and not updated your profile, then you won’t receive the notifications. Note: If expected notifications aren’t being received it's worth checking your email inbox to make sure the alerts and reminders aren't being directed to your spam or junk mail folder. If your organisation has an overall spam filter / firewall, then your System Administrator or IT person can add the PeopleSafe Alerts email address, no-reply@peoplesafe.co.nz, to your whitelist. For individual users, add PeopleSafeAlerts  email address, no-reply@peoplesafe.co.nz  to your Safe Sender list or Contact list to stop this from happening.

Text Alert Phone Number 

By adding a cellphone number this gives the User access to the  StoryAnywhere feature , to receive messages from their managers or PeopleSafe Coordinators and for Manage Users and PeopleSafe Coordinators to receive Serious Story notifications on this number. If something in a story is considered serious, extra notifications are sent; via email and text message to make sure the message gets through.

Receive Notifications of relevant ‘serious’ Events   YES /NO

This option appears in the Work details section, but only in the profile of people with PeopleSafe Coordinator or Manage Users security clearance.You have the choice to change this to NO. If you switch to NO, you won’t receive these notifications. This is not generally recommended.

Assign and Notify relevant Manager/Coordinator Tasks

This option appears in the Work details section and only applies to PeopleSafe Coordinators or Manage Users. You have the choice to switch this to Yes or No, in your profile. If you switch it to No,the people concerned won’t receive these notifications. This is not recommended. 

Jobs

Manage Users

If you have Manage User security clearance this means you have staff that do Jobs that you manage. The Jobs you manage must have first been added under Jobs in the Organisation profile.They will then appear in the drop-down list under Jobs in a Manage User’s profile. To receive notifications about the staff you manage you must select the Jobs they do as part of their role. See article explaining Jobs in more detail.  Note  To receive notification of expired training you'll need to make sure that the training is a requirement of a Job.  See Training article.

Organisation Profile

Fields in an Organisation Profile that affect notifications

Auto-generate tasks for expired training / for gear checks/ for safety plans needing periodic review  - Yes / No

In your Organisation Profile in the Preferences section, there are a number of auto-generate options that can be turned off / set to No. For staff to receive these notifications these preferences must be set to Yes. 

Send notifications of 'Serious' Stories to ALL managers   Yes / No

If you don't want your managers to receive serious story notifications you can turn it off here. However we recommend this is set to Yes. If individual managers do not wish to receive them  or you don’t want them to receive these notifications, this can be done from within their  Staff Profile in the Work detail section: Set, 'Receive notifications of relevant serious events'  to No.

This way you can decide who gets these notifications and who doesn’t.

For help to update/edit Staff Profiles & Organisation settings see our Related Articles.

What triggers a notification 

  • StoryAnywhere is used in the Mobile App
  • Tell Full Story is used in the Web Browser
  • Training is booked or expired
  • Risks and Safety Plans  
  • Gear checks
  • A task is added for another user

What is the timing around Notifications being sent

Notifications are sent as soon as a Story is told, or a Task created. The exceptions are the notifications that arise from training or gear checks for example that are set to recur. These are sent out during quiet periods in the small hours of the morning using our Chron process. Chron has a look at your PeopleSafe site and finds all of the things that are coming up to expire, are overdue or need doing etc. The benefits are, that Chron gives you one consolidated email as opposed to sending you multiple emails during the day and allows our software the chance to complete this process during 'quiet' time without interruption. This is a standard SAAS (software as a service) procedure

What sort of information is in a notification

The content of a notification depends on the subject matter.  It is important you read the detail in the notification carefully and then to find out more click the link provided to get to the full detail in PeopleSafe. 

Notification Categories

Story Notifications

As soon as a story is told using PeopleSafe, a notification or notifications are sent. 

Provided profiles are set up correctly, all PeopleSafe Coordinators, and Managers who are assigned as the Manager of staff involved, will receive a Story Alert which contains main details of the Story, and will be assigned the Review Task.

The email alerts, and message displayed from the person telling the Story, include details of why PeopleSafe thinks the Story is potentially serious, to help you take appropriate actions sooner.

If you click on the link in the email and you get an error message: “Could not find or load that Task”, there are a couple reasons why:

  1. The story review task may already been reviewed so the review has been completed. Multiple people may have access to the story or have been tasked to view it. Disregard the task notification.
  2. The receiver of the task doesn't have the correct security clearance or visibility of the story teller so will not be able to access the task. Check the user’s security clearance to confirm. Regard the task as a notification of incident and not a requirement to complete the task.
  3. The review task has been deleted and the story has not yet been reviewed. You'll still need to review the story even though the task has been deleted. You'll find a review button next to the story when in the Smart-list view of all Stories.

Serious Story Notifications

Serious stories are treated differently in PeopleSafe. If something happens in a Story that is considered serious there are extra notifications that are sent to users with Coordinator Security Clearance, and anyone with a Manage Users Security Clearance, providing their profile has these settings set correctly to Yes. 

When a Story is deemed 'serious' by way of certain triggers PeopleSafe will send out a TXT notification and an extra email. You can read what those triggers are HERE PeopleSafe will also send these notifications to those who have their details in your Organisation profile under 'Our Organisation'. We think it's a great idea that everyone who has elevated access be kept in the loop should they need to step in and give a hand. This means all managers will receive serious story alerts even if they aren't the manager of the person in the story.

If you don't want all your managers to receive the notification you can turn it off in the Organisation Settings. Switch 'Send notifications of 'Serious' Stories to ALL managers' from YES to NO.

Task Notifications

When a Task is added for you in PeopleSafe it will automatically appear on your task list in your PeopleSafe account. If you have an email address in the 'work email address' field in your profile then you'll also get an email notifying you of the task with a link to jump straight into PeopleSafe and view it.

PeopleSafe will notify you as soon as the task has been created. This is the same if the task is a repeat. For example, if you have a gear check or meeting task that repeats every six months then when the task is completed PeopleSafe will automatically create the task that's due in six months time and add it to your task list.  

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