London Loves Business speaks to David Wright, director of Edtesa, about online safety, building a positive work environment and how the pandemic has changed the focus on online safety.
What does Edtesa do?
Edtesa is an online platform offering UK businesses and organisations a suite of digital tools to assist in online safety practice whilst also supporting the development of healthy, positive work environments. A subsidiary of the online safety charity South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL), we launched Edtesa in April, building on over 20 years’ experience in providing online safety products and services which help organisations develop safer, healthier and more positive work environments.
Following years of careful research, we’ve launched two tools with Edtesa designed specifically for business:
- Dashup: an anonymous communication system that allows staff to send SMS messages and online forms to management. Dashup improves internal communication and builds peace of mind within the workplace.
- Tagflag: an online reputation-monitoring tool that keeps track of online mentions and analyses digital reputation. Tagflag gathers comments and provides a detailed breakdown of sentiment and influence so businesses can assess whether they have a positive or negative impact online.
What are three milestones you plan to achieve?
Our goal is simple: through our online tools, we want to help create healthy, positive work environments, so that
people and organisations can achieve ongoing success and sustainability in the technology age. It can be challenging to keep track of everything going on in your organisation, so Edtesa aims to offer peace of mind solutions to cover various essential aspects of business management. Our team is focused on promoting online wellbeing in the work environment with the aim of improving long-term productivity and value.
With our specialist team of professionals, we ensure our services are up to date with the latest tech developments so your business can stay ahead of the game and maximise its potential.
What are some of the key challenges businesses face online?
In the last six to twelve months, many businesses have migrated online or at least built an online presence, creating whole new areas of the company to manage. With a digital brand identity now live, do you know how to monitor and control what is being said on social media? How do you know that what you’re doing is reaching the right places and the right audiences? Are they responding in ways you’d expect and desire? Are you being talked about in the right way? Without a tool to monitor your digital reputation, you’re operating in the dark.
With that in mind, we have created innovative online tools to help give businesses more control over their company’s online reputation. It also gives them a clear picture of their next steps towards either maintaining or improving their presence, ultimately helping towards the achievement of their organisation goals.
What do organisations need to do to reinforce positive work environments?
Wellbeing and honest conversations will be critical for businesses to create positive work environments. With the
return and readjustment to a more normal working life, employers will benefit from really understanding how their
staff may be feeling as they progress through the transition stage. Crucially, wellbeing mustn’t be an arbitrary
tick-box exercise. It’s those businesses who better understand and support their staff who will progress more
rapidly during this transition.
In many cases, companies have been operating with a distributed workforce that won’t have seen each other for months, and some individuals will take time to click back into collaborative working.
Now is the time for businesses to invest in online systems to understand better the situation and sentiment of individuals in their workforce. Senior leadership needs to have its finger on the pulse of how well its workers are
operating at this critical time of transition. Success isn’t just about the bottom line; a company is little without its
people, so it’s important to listen, seek to understand and act.
Importantly, this requires a human element as well to take the data and information collected and respond to it
with understanding and compassion. Digital may be the future, but it’s not a panacea.
How has the pandemic changed the focus on online safety?
You only have to have the most cursory knowledge of the news with daily coverage of internet scams and companies being hacked to understand that as the world moved online, so did less savoury aspects of our society.
However, companies have been going full tilt to keep going, pivot, and for many non-digital first businesses, it’s
been an incredibly tough time. Business chiefs have focused on keeping the lights on, and now as we look to life
post-Covid, people are reassessing what these new ways of working mean in terms of ensuring both their people
and their brands can be safe on the internet.
What is that one key advice that you have for organisations?
At Edtesa, we believe that profit is no longer the only measure of how successful you are as an organisation. The internet allows so many more factors to determine who you are as a company, what you stand for, how secure
you are and what processes you have in place to adapt to the modern world. As your digital footprint’s grown,
your responsibilities will have changed in the last few years; you can’t afford to make mistakes. It’s essential to be one-step ahead, so you don’t get left behind.
What are your future plans?
We want to make sure that everyone can benefit from the internet and technology and our future plans will
always have that message at the heart. These aspects of modern life can, when used properly, help businesses
be more profitable and productive and allow people to have a better experience with their jobs. Going forward,
keeping people safe online is always at the epicentre of all the work that we do.
Leave a Comment