Lone workers perform their duties with an elevated risk due to the fact that they are not directly supervised and therefore may be forgotten about. Companies are now implementing safety measures so that nobody is left behind.

Line managers and mid-level management are pivotal to ensuring the safety of their employees on a daily basis. While face to face conversations are important, the reality is that there are more employees than ever before working from home, or in the field who are very often, out of sight and out of mind.

With their days often spent running from one meeting to another while answering urgent emails in between, mid-level and line managers often forget to check in with their direct reports to make sure that they are working efficiently, and are safe.

Who is a lone worker?

All employees that do not come in direct face to face contact with their supervisors are at high risk of being out of sight and out of mind. Most notably are the following four groups of employees:

1. Working at a fixed remote location: This could be a retail store, a gas station, a gravel pit, or a small office. 
2. Working in the field, at home or another fixed location: This includes field workers in industries like utilities, oil & gas, transportation & logistics, public services, public safety; service contractors in building maintenance, HVAC; real estate workers; and health, medical and social care workers visiting people’s homes. 
3. Working from home on a regular basis
4. Working in a more secluded part of a workplace with minimal to no supervision found in industries like manufacturing, warehousing or construction.
5. Working outside standard working hours like security guards and night-shift workers.

Establishing adequate safety procedures

Each of the above mentioned groups have an associated risk in their work environment which needs to have defined safety procedures put in place to mitigate the risks. These procedures should not be an additional burden to the worker, but need to be established and implemented by the mid-level and line managers. Best practices may include establishing communications between the managers and workers on a routine basis. Technology can help here to quickly see if an employee has reported for duty, is available and where they are located and what their safety status is.

Moving to a risk aware company culture

With the generational changes on how employees view their relationship with their work, more and more companies are moving to risk aware cultures as they have found that workers who do not feel safe, tend to lack motivation and have lower performance and higher turnover. Finally, the cost of a single incident exceeds the cost of implementing a technology based safety procedure by far, demonstrating that risk aware work culture is beneficial for both employees and the bottom line.