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Guide

Guide to Mitigating Lone-Worker Safety Risk Coming out of the Pandemic

Noggin

Safety Management

Updated April 18, 2024

Lone-worker safety risk increasing with the pandemic

The pandemic is swelling the ranks of lone workers. Further complicating matters is the fact that those lone workers aren’t feeling safe in their jobs.

The numbers of stark. Almost half of lone workers have acknowledged not feeling safe at work, according to industry datai. Nineteen per cent of lone workers report having an accident and struggling to get help.

What’s going on? Well, lone workers feel secure when they are connected.

Conversely, they feel less safe when they are out of connectivity range. Which is unfortunately becoming the norm.

Fewer than 32 per cent of employers confirmed that they were able to track the location of their lone workers once out of range.

That’s not all. Only half of all respondents reported having the ability to send and receive messages while lone workers were out of cellphone range. Slightly fewer than half of all respondents answered that they had procedures that could always be followed to get messages sent and received without reception. 

Matters only got worse from there. Only 28 per cent of responding organizations reported daily check-ins with their lone workers. The number bumped up slightly to 39 per cent (for weekly check-ins), plateauing at 45 per cent (for as-needed, on-demand check-ins).

What’s more, a mere 17 per cent confirmed having a tracking system enabling lone workers to check-in themselves, with just around ten per cent disclosing checking in multiple times per day.

Why does it matter? A worker’s sense of safety and wellbeing is crucial to their productivity, engagement, and satisfaction in the job – the latter being of increasing importance during the Great Resignationii.

Not only that, but safety mangers, without the necessary systems in place to ensure constant connectivity with lone workers, will often have to dispense their value-added time and energy tracking those workers – or incur outsized safety incident and compliance risk.

What can be done, instead, to mitigate the safety and wellbeing risk to lone workers and (residual) compliance risk to employers? It’s more than just resource procurement.

Pre-existing challenges with identifying lone workers in your organization

After all, lone worker has long been an ambiguous term for the purposes of safety risk management. As a result, employers must have a detailed understanding of who’s included in the category to avoid misidentifying their lone worker populations.

Who, then, are the lone workers in your organization? It might be difficult to tell. Lone workers don’t always work alone.

Most jurisdictions, for instance those in Australia, will define lone work as professional work undertaken in a remote or isolated fashion and carried out in a fixed facility or away from a worker’s typical base.

Traditional representatives of the lone-worker class include social workers, security officers, truck drivers, delivery agents, realtors, in-home health aides, and traveling salespeople.

Historically, the industries who’ve employed the bulk of the lone-worker population include manufacturing, construction, property maintenance and real estate, retail, healthcare, utilities, operational security, logistics, energy, and the creative industries.

The take-off in remote work with the pandemic slightly complicates this picture, as does the growth of contracting and subcontracting. Both phenomena have contributed to the explosion of lone workers.

In consequence, lone worker has often become a catchall to describe any employee, direct or contracted, who works in a location where regular communications and steady supervision aren’t always available.

Negative effects of unregulated lone work 

  • A drop in productivity
  • More employee absences
  • Worse on-job morale
  • Greater likelihood of occupational mistakes and mishaps
  • Increased turnover
  • A lower corporate reputation
  • Financial and legal penalty

By the book: Defining “lone work” 

The definition of lone work varies by jurisdiction and so does the nomenclature. For instance, Australia’s work health and safety regulator, Safe Work Australia uses the category of remote and isolated work, simply defined as work that is isolated from the assistance of other people, either because of the location, time, or nature of the work being done.

According to Safe Work Australia, remote and isolated work doesn’t necessarily mean that a worker is alone, or even isolated. Indeed, a (city) building cleaner working without help qualifies as a remote or isolated worker, just as much as a truck driver who’s far away from an urban center.

Safe Work Australia gives the following examples of remote or isolated workers:

  • All-night convenience store and service station attendants
  • Mobile sales representatives, including real estate agents
  • Long-distance freight transport drivers 
  • Scientists, park rangers, and others carrying out fieldwork alone or in remote locations
  • Health and community workers working in isolation with members of the public.

How organizations can ensure proper care for their lone workers

Further, managing the work health and safety risk to lone workers is part and parcel of the duty of care requirement of a PCBU (Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking).

That’s the employer obligation (within reasonable limits) to ensure the health and safety of all workers while they’re at workiii. In fact, the general duty often entails eliminating all risks to worker health and safety. And, if risks can’t be fully eliminated, as might be the case with remote and isolated work, they must at least be minimized to an extent that’s reasonably practical.

The duty extends to third-party contractors, as well. These are often the parties likeliest to be executing remote and isolated work, as well as to direct employees. 

Assessing lone-worker risk

How to go about it: come up with a lone-worker risk mitigation strategy that dovetails into the larger work health and safety risk mitigation strategy. Doing so, however, entails first assessing lone-worker risk.

Context matters, here. In many contexts, remote and isolated work carries more inherent risk than other forms of work, whether it’s greater exposure to violent acts from customers or poorer access from emergency services should any incident occur. The risk assessment, as such, should fully consider the factors intrinsic to the kind of lone work executed at your organization.

To do so, you’ll have to ask some of the following questions to adequately gauge the lone-worker riskiv

What kind of lone work is being done?

It’s not enough to know that lone work is taking place. As a safety risk manager, you need to know the precise nature of the lone work that’s being done, as well. For instance, cleaning an office at night carries far different risk than work with heavy machines, at heights, with hazardous substances, or (even) simply in a hazardous plant.

Simply knowing whether high-risk activity is involved in lone work isn’t enough, though. Safety professionals and risk teams will need to dig deeper. 

Risk is always dynamic. At first glance, driving might not seem like a high-risk activity, but factor in long hours and the potential for violence and aggression on the road, and risk increases. The same goes for (extreme) environmental conditions. 

Where is the lone work taking place?

Sometimes, remote and isolated work takes place at a significant geographical remove from emergency response and rescue services. 

When is the lone work being done?

Statistically, remote and isolated work at night typically increases the risk of exposure to violence.

How long will the lone work take? 

Similarly, the risk to a lone worker might grow as time (on the job) increases. 

Who are your lone workers? 

Remote and isolated work is often specialized work, calling for a specialized skillset. Both the business unit assigning the work and the team controlling for work-related risk should know the lone worker’s level of experience and training. HR should be brought into the loop as well if there’s a pre-existing medical condition that can increase risk. 

What means of communication do you have with your lone workers? 

Risk teams must also ascertain what kind of communications the lone worker will have (with base operations), while on the job. Will a team in a fixed setting remain in regular contact with the lone worker? And also, is the remote and isolated work taking place in a location where available communications might be impaired?v

Lone-worker risk mitigation: Key factors to consider

  • Security and safety: Lone workers are often at higher risk of attack from customers and/ or strangers. Similarly, lone work poses a high risk of on-the-job mishaps, accidents to which organizations will find it more logistically difficult to respond. 
  • Isolation
    • Social: Many lone workers may suffer from the effects of social isolation, which over time can dampen employee engagement, morale, and productivity. If possible, organizations should seek regular opportunities to bring lone workers in contact with the rest of the team.
    • Organizational: Though in a remote or isolated work environment, lone workers should still receive the same information, training, and development opportunities as those granted to other employees.
    • Technological: The same logic applies to access to advanced technologies. Lone workers should be able to access the same digital platforms as their office-based colleagues.
Source: Employment New Zealand

Controlling lone-worker risk

Once you’ve identified and assessed an acceptable level of lone-worker risk, it’ll be time to implement controls.

These are the actual strategies and tools, to manage the risk, either to significantly mitigate it or eliminate it altogether. Necessary controlling measures will vary by jurisdiction, but they usually include the following:

  • Worker consultation and involvement in the consideration of potential risks and in the development of measures to control them
  • Taking affirmative steps to remove risks (where possible), or implementing control measures
  • A degree of specialized instruction, training, and supervision
  • Periodic review of the risk assessment as well as subsequent reviews after significant changes in working practice

Those control measures, however, only provide a floor, not a ceiling, for acceptable behavior. To recoup the full benefits of remote and isolated work without increasing risk, the PCBU must implement its own best-practice controls. Remember, these controls will reduce or eliminate at least one of the following risk components:

  • Probability of occurring 
  • Severity
  • Exposure of people and equipmentvi

In the case of remote and isolated work, best-practice control efforts need to start with suitable training for lone workers, training which focuses on concrete, practical strategies to remain safe in specific lone-work settings. Those remote or isolated environments also need to be made as safe as possible for lone workers, which means that business and risk teams must perform due diligence on the setting that the worker is entering and relay those findings to the lone worker.

Additionally, senior leadership at the PCBU can also allay some of the organizational and social isolation that attends lone work – that isolation can dampen employee
engagement and lower productivity – by making a point to communicate the employer’s commitment to the lone worker’s health and safety.

What’s more, business teams should only recruit capable employees for remote and isolated work. For instance, professionals already accustomed to performing lone work are more likely to bring valuable experience and expertise to the risk mitigation consultation, development, and engagement processes. In turn, that experience and expertise can improve the process for future lone workers.

PCBUs must also provision their lone workers with the necessary tools and services to perform remote and isolated work effectively and safely, whether that’s access to workplace layouts, the help and supervision of a buddy, personal protective equipment, first aid supplies, and safety management technologies (See more below).

On the PCBU’s end, keeping movement records of lone workers, potentially via satellite-powered tracking systems or lower-fi call-in systems, will also help mitigate the work health and safety risk to lone workers.

Safety management technology to mitigate lone-worker risk

PCBUs must provide support to personnel working alone by enabling them to create a lone worker session, assign them a guardian, and check in on them at regular intervals. Technology interventions, such as Noggin for Safety Management, can help with the following capabilities:

  • Reduce barriers for personnel to request lone worker sessions using simple and intuitive forms
  • Simplify check-ins by enabling personnel to respond by clicking a link in an SMS
  • Plan resources ahead of time by enabling lone worker sessions to be requested for future dates
  • Enable either personnel or guardians to set the automatic check-in frequency
  • Automatically escalate notifications to a guardian when a worker does not check in
  • Generate predictive analytics by understanding when you typically have higher volumes of requests.

Finally, employers are facing increased risk from swelling populations of lone workers, resulting from the pandemic. But it’s not as if lone-worker risk wasn’t on the upswing well before.

Getting a handle on the risk will entail understanding who lone workers are and what the threat environment currently is.

Fortunately, the best-practice, lone-worker risk assessment and control protocols advanced in this guide should help. Mitigating risk will also entail resource interventions in the right safety management software, such as Noggin.

These solutions will help employers implement the appropriate controls before lone worker risk metastasizes into safety incidents. Beyond controlling risk, they will also help employers improve the safety culture at their organization while signaling to workers that their concerns are valued, and their wellbeing is being safeguarded.

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Sources

i. EHS Today: Almost 1/5 of Lone Workers Struggled to Get Help After Accident. Available at https://www.ehstoday.com/safety/article/21234316/almost-15-of-lone-workers-struggled-to-get-help-after-accident.

ii. EHS Today: The Great Resignation: 3 Challenges Facing EHS. Available at https://www.ehstoday.com/sponsored/article/21237952/the-greatresignation-3-challenges-facing-ehs.

iii. Tom Musick, Safety and Health Magazine: Lone worker safety: Organizations can take steps to ensure safety for people who work alone. Available at https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/12628-lone-worker-safety.

iv. Safe Work Australia: Managing the work environment and facilities: Code of Practice. Available at https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/system/files/documents/1809/code_of_practice_-_managing_the_work_environment_and_facilities.pdf.

v. Ibid.

vi. Federal Aviation Administration: FAA System Safety Handbook. Available at https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/risk_management/ss_handbook/media/Chap15_1200.pdf