It’s estimated that 8 million people in the United Kingdom are lone workers – which is defined by the Health and Safety Executive as workers that often work independently without direct supervision. Naturally, this can put lone workers in a more vulnerable position if they are in a separate location to other colleagues and team members.
The unfortunate reality is that crime statistics show that lone workers are at risk of being physically/verbally attacked every day in a number of different industries and scenarios. They could specifically be targeted because they are working alone, so this vulnerability should be taken incredibly seriously by employers.
If your company employs lone workers, here’s how you can offer protection:
Policy Support
As an employer, it’s integral you have health and safety policy in place to protect lone workers, enforced by the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations. Health and safety risks must be managed and your industry will have its own set of unique requirements and challenges. Make sure employees are trained, supervised and monitored with regards to potential hazards, ensuring that you can control measures and risks.
Assessing whether certain workers are suitable for lone working is necessary, as some employees might not be physically or mentally suitable to work or have certain medical conditions that make it more difficult.
Encourage and make it easy for employees to identify and report incidents and put training in place to help them recognise situations with risk attached and use conflict resolution techniques when they can.
Limit Lone Working
Obviously, if your company employs lone workers, they will frequently be working alone and it’s often not realistic or cost-effective to be able to change this, but if you can limit the amount of lone working someone does, you can help to protect their physical and mental wellbeing in the long-run.
Adding extra staff to some work scenarios or encouraging workers to go on jobs together when they can, helps to limit the amount of time that your workers are alone on jobs and gives them more confidence.
Lone Working Technology
Here at Steanne, our product GeoSafeguard can help to monitor and protect lone workers in your company. We’ve created a system that displays currently active lone workers details and automatically updates, sending an alert to your team when a lone worker has been non-responsive. When a Panic Alarm is triggered, GeoSafeGuard will highlight the location of an individual, sounding an alarm and prompting an immediate response.
A few of the product’s key features are:
- Panic Alarm
- Worker Selectable Risk Levels
- Configurable Alert Countdown and Shift Assignment
- Comprehensive Auditing and Reporting
- Filter Workers by Departments and Sites
- Map Portal display and GPS Location Tracking
Your company can easily input and change details regarding shift patterns, risk levels and mobile devices for line workers. It gives you a reliable, time-sensitive way to monitor large groups of lone workers at once, access reports and keep employees safe.
To talk through your options with a member of our experienced team, please contact us today for lone working protection.