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This guide explains what a lone worker policy is, why you need one, how to create a lone worker policy, and the most critical elements to incorporate.
Published 22 May 2023
A lone worker policy is an official document that establishes your organization's regulations for ensuring the safety of employees who work alone or in isolated environments.
Every lone worker policy should outline general guidance for working safely, potential lone worker hazards and risks, roles and responsibilities, clear and simple safety procedures and processes to follow, tools to use, how to assess and report incidents, and what to do in the event of an emergency.
The specific elements of your lone worker policy may differ, based on your organization’s industry, legal obligations, needs, and the hazards and risks that are common in your field. Your lone worker policy should be reviewed and updated regularly for continuous improvement.
Between healthcare workers providing home visits, surveyors completing site inspections, utility workers operating in dangerous or remote areas, or office employees working from home, lone workers come in many forms. But they all have one important thing in common: they work alone or isolated, without close, regular, or direct supervision, and therefore, face higher health and safety risks than those who do not.
With the rise of lone and remote workers, every organization should prioritize creating a lone worker policy to ensure the safety of their employees.
A lone worker safety policy is one of the most important ways your organization can protect the safety and health of its mobile workforce.
When used as a practical, go-to guide for managers and employees, this policy empowers lone workers to take responsibility for their own safety and ensures that everyone is prepared to respond in the event of an emergency.
In addition, it may be legally required of your organization to have a lone worker health and safety policy in place, especially for certain cases like working at night.
Australia’s Work Health and Safety Act 2011 maintains that, so far as is reasonably practicable, organizations must ensure “the provision and maintenance of safe systems of work” and “the provision of any information, training, instruction or supervision that is necessary to protect all persons from risks to their health and safety.” It also states that workplaces and workers’ health must be monitored to prevent illness or injury.
Among other countries, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and New Zealand all have similar workplace health and safety laws, stating that employers have a general duty of care to provide and ensure safe workplaces, safe systems and ways of working (policies and procedures), and the health and safety of all employees.
Without implementing a carefully considered lone worker safety policy, your organization and its officers could be in breach of government regulations – and therefore, exposed to workers’ compensation claims, lawsuits, fines, and in some cases, prison time.
When employees work alone, they are exposed to higher risk of experiencing a serious incident. According to the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), risks that particularly affect lone workers include:
Other very common, high-risk incidents that employees could face include trips, slips, falls, and transportation accidents, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Of course, the above is not an exhaustive list of lone worker risks; each industry and every work environment is different. Regularly carrying out Lone Worker Risk Assessments can help your organization identify and assess the specific risks your lone workers face.
Having a lone worker policy in place that mitigates these risks through safe work practices and the use of tools (such as the SHEQSY Lone Worker App) can ensure that employees are safe 24/7 – no matter where they are.
Without monitoring your lone workers’ activities, you may not find out that an emergency has occurred until it is too late.
Having the right real-time monitoring systems, check-in and reporting procedures, and emergency response coordination processes in place can ensure that organizations know exactly where lone workers are, what they are doing, and that they are safe. Most importantly, when an emergency occurs, lone workers are able to activate their duress and receive the assistance they require.
So how do you monitor employees when they work alone? You can deploy a lone worker safety app. SHEQSY by SafetyCulture is a lone worker safety solution that protects workers in real-time with duress alarms, periodic check-ins, and overtime alerts – while keeping managers informed. Through customized automated notification workflows, you can have confidence that alerts will be sent to the right team leaders every time. Learn more about SHEQSY.
Your lone worker policy document should be customized to meet the needs of your organization, comply with legal obligations, and mitigate specific lone worker risks. However, there are a few essential elements that every organization should include in their lone working safety policies, no matter the industry.
In the next section, we will expand on the essential elements of a lone working policy and outline the six key steps in creating your own.
Comcare’s Guide to Remote or Isolated Work, published by the Australian Government, defines lone workers as those who “work by themselves and/or work in the community with only limited support arrangements, which therefore expose them to risk by being isolated from the usual back-up support. This is the case whether they regularly work alone or are only occasionally alone and do not have access to immediate support from managers or other colleagues.”
In other words, anyone who works alone, or in an isolated environment where other colleagues cannot see or hear them, is a lone worker.
Start by identifying all of your employees who work alone regularly. Some examples include delivery drivers, home healthcare workers, utility maintenance staff, social workers, and even employees working from their home offices.
It may be more difficult to identify other lone workers, such as those who do not work in continuous isolation or in remote locations. Examples may include office employees who leave for meetings, service calls, or to visit a job site, or employees who work after hours.
Identifying as many lone worker hazards and assessing their risks is critical to the effectiveness of your lone worker safety policy. Ultimately, the goal is to identify (and then rectify) as many health and safety issues as possible.
This Lone Working Risk Assessment Example can guide you through the eight steps involved in identifying and assessing lone worker risks:
If you identified a variety of different lone worker roles in Step 1, then it may be advisable to complete a lone worker risk assessment for each role. Only then, can you be sure that you have identified all of the common risks your employees could face.
With common hazards and risks in mind, set out to create a clear, specific, and practical guide to working alone safely. This section of the policy should be customized to fit your organization’s industry, employees, and other unique factors, but typically should include the following:
Next, you must outline the roles and responsibilities of everyone covered in the policy: lone workers, team leaders, managers, supervisors, officers, and if applicable, your professional security monitoring center. This section of the lone worker safety policy should answer these questions:
Creating a new lone worker policy is pointless unless it is actually followed and referred to regularly. It is very important to ensure that your management team and lone workers understand your lone worker policy, how to use it, and most importantly, why they should.
It may not always be possible to detail all of your standard operating procedures within the policy. It is also important to note that people learn in different ways. Therefore, your lone worker policy should include additional resources, information, and opportunities for training.
Make sure to include information about how employees can:
Lone worker roles, workplaces and their conditions, government regulations, and industry best practices can all change over time. Perhaps the most important step in creating a lone worker policy is reviewing, updating, and improving it regularly. Depending on the nature of the work, annual or bi-annual reviews and updates may be wise.
You may be wondering, how can our organization possibly fulfill our duty of care – and our own safety policies – to monitor the health and safety of employees when they are all alone? Not to mention, how can we ensure policy compliance among staff members?
Deploying a lone worker solution is how.
SHEQSY is the leading lone worker safety app that protects employees in real-time and makes it easy to manage, monitor and report on lone worker activities from one dynamic, user-friendly dashboard.
From regular check-ins and overtime alerts, to hazard reporting and emergency notifications, SHEQSY provides a suite of intuitive and fully customizable safety features to ensure your organization can fulfill its lone worker safety policy and legal obligations with ease – while giving your lone workers the tools to stay safe and connected 24/7.
Watch this quick video to see SHEQSY in action:
Interested in learning more? Sign up for SHEQSY here.
Maddy Cornelius
Maddy is a content contributor for SafetyCulture. She has worked as a digital marketer and copywriter in the risk management industry for more than a decade. When she’s not writing for SafetyCulture, Maddy runs a popular travel and food blog and enjoys snowboarding, practicing yoga, hiking, and spending time exploring outdoors.
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