How Can I Keep My Lone Workers Safe?

There are a number of things you should do to help better protect your lone workers.

Carry Out a Lone Worker Risk Assessment

Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, general risk assessments must be completed by all employers. Additionally, those with five or more employees must record significant findings.

Although it’s not necessary to conduct a separate risk assessment for lone workers, they should be considered in an employer’s general risk assessment.

LEARN HOW TO CONDUCT A RISK ASSESSMENT

Create a Lone Working Policy

This is a practical guide that your employees can apply to their roles. An effective lone worker policy can help to promote a strong safety culture among employees and reduce the risk of legal issues. The key to a strong policy is to consider the potential risks that lone working employees face and offer best practice guidance.

Your lone working policy should include:

risks (by job role or lone worker type)
key definitions
background information and purpose statement
your organisational commitment
clearly-defined responsibilities
guidance on reporting incidents
any relevant support and contact details.

We’ve created a step-by-step document to help you create/update your own lone working policy. Remember that this isn’t a simple “cut and paste” exercise; your policy should be unique to your organisation.

Download lone working policy guide and template

For expert guidance and policy reviews, contact the Suzy Lamplugh Trust here.

Provide Lone Worker Training

Additional training may be required for lone working staff in order to deal with the specific risks of working alone. Without colleagues around, it is often more difficult for lone workers to get help in the event of an emergency.

Therefore, they need to be trained to cope with uncertain and unexpected situations such as injury or violence.

Training is a vital step in ensuring the safety of all staff, but for lone working employees, training is particularly important. Working independently means there are no colleagues around to point out a health and safety risk that could lead to an accident or provide a helping hand in the event of an emergency. Therefore, lone workers need to have the ability to identify and handle risks by themselves.

Effective training empowers employees to recognise potential hazards and respond confidently in emergencies,

Implement a Lone Worker Service

Lone worker services, like the one provided by Peoplesafe, are accredited solutions that are specifically designed to monitor the safety of employees working alone and act quickly in an emergency.

Investing in a lone worker service can have a number of benefits. Not only will you be meeting your duty of care, but staff will feel safer at work and more valued as an employee, helping to reduce staff turnover and all the associated costs with recruitment.

In addition, when looking at the bigger picture, the cost of an employee suffering an injury or dangerous incident at work will result in much more crippling costs than protecting them in the first place.

“Undertake a cost benefit analysis by researching actual and potential incidents, examining whether your risk mitigation is working for the whole process. Not everything is foreseeable and we found that technology assisted us in providing staff with a further protective measure which was a significant and proportionate approach.

You cannot replace people.”

Jennifer Newbury, East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust