Page 48 - OHS, April/May 2025

L O N E W O R K E R S A F E T Y
The Shared Responsibility of Lone Worker Safety
Technology can help lone workers stay in communication and signal for help—but only
leadership, communication, and engagement can prevent incidents before they happen.
BY RAY PREST
text of workplace safety, that’s true for some more than for
There’s an old saying that every man is an island. In the con-
others. In many companies, people have a veritable team of
safety managers, shift supervisors, and co-workers looking
out for them. Organizations with a proactive approach to safety
have safety professionals who analyze incident data and work
teams that discuss hazards at tailgate talks, all in an eff ort to keep
each other safe. Even at companies with a terrible safety track re-
cord, there is bound to be someone nearby who can signal for aid
if there’s an injury requiring medical attention.
Not so for lone workers. Working on their own, oft en remotely
and far from help, lone workers cannot count on a co-worker to re-
mind them to wear their PPE. Th ey cannot rely on the vital human
factors management technique of paying attention to the actions
of others, such as noticing someone yawn, to help them hone in
on the need to mitigate their own fatigue. Th ey cannot expect a su-
pervisor to intervene when they notice an injury about to happen.
And when an incident does occur, a lone worker has to call for help
on their own—if they can.
And so an entire industry has cropped up around lone worker
safety. Th ere now exists a host of technological solutions from
wearable devices and GPS tracking to check-in systems and emer-
gency buttons, all run through a variety of platforms and monitor-
ing centers. Th ese devices are meant to give supervisors the ability
to monitor lone workers, and to grant those remote employees the
ability to ask for help when they need it.
Th ese are important safety tools, to be sure. But someone in a
remote environment is still on their own, no matter how many satel-
lite signals ping back and forth to indicate whether they’re doing fi ne
or in distress. It’s fantastic that lone workers can call for help when
they need it, and the ability to do so can save lives. However, remote
monitoring is unable to reduce the risk of an incident occurring in
the fi rst place. Status updates from employees in the fi eld are lagging
indicators, and lone workers are still all alone on their island.
Th e fi rst steps to lone worker safety look a lot like the basic safe-
ty practices in most workplaces: identify hazards, conduct risk as-
sessments, provide the appropriate protective equipment, develop
procedures, and make arrangements to mitigate the risk of injury,
all while accounting for the unique characteristics of solo work.
Th ese and other best practices should, of course, form the back-
bone of a lone worker safety program. Done properly, they can ac-
count for a good portion of the dangers that lone workers face ev-
ery day. But proper procedures and risk assessments aren’t enough
to fully keep people safe when they’re out there alone. We know
that engagement plays a massive role in injury rates, with Gallup
fi nding that workers with low levels of engagement experience 64
percent more incidents than their highly engaged counterparts.
You can do almost everything right with lone worker safety, but if
you don’t have a plan to keep employees engaged, then you don’t
have a plan that will keep them truly safe.
Every employee should have a supervisor or manager of some
kind, and lone workers are no diff erent. When people are isolated
from other employees, contact with their supervisor may look a
little diff erent, but the core principles are the same.
Frequent communication is key. In a typical workplace, em-
ployees are constantly receiving information from their supervi-
sors, from their co-workers, and from safety signs and displays.
Because many of these inputs are missing for lone workers, it’s up
to their supervisors to fi ll in the gaps.
Th e ideal form of safety communication is face-to-face or, bar-
ring that, a video or phone call, as it allows a supervisor to convey
as much information as possible (via tone and body language), and
it also humanizes the interaction. But as one recent white paper on
safety leadership notes, there are other options, and supervisor/
employee interactions “may occur face to face but can also include
instant messaging, texts or whatever mode of connection is avail-
able if in-person conversation isn’t an option.”
Volume of communication matters, and so does quality. Lone
workers have a job to do, and they don’t want to feel pestered while
they’re doing it. Supervisors need to time their check-ins well, and
must make the most of each interaction.
Th e timing matters because risk isn’t static—it fl uctuates—and
an employee who is hyper-focused one minute may lapse into fa-
tigue the next. A lone worker who drags their feet at the start of
the workday may, as time ticks by, rush to catch up, which ratchets
up the chances that they overlook a key safety procedure. A good
supervisor should know the tendencies of their employees and
schedule their check-ins accordingly.
Workers also need to feel like they’re having a real two-way
conversation with their supervisors. Salesforce Research discov-
ered that workers who feel like they are being heard by manage-
ment are four and a half times more likely to feel empowered—and
as we’ve seen, there’s a direct link between engagement levels and
safety outcomes. One tactic is to approach it indirectly by steering
the conversation toward safety topics where the lone worker can
share their perspective.
Supervisors should be in constant contact, with timely commu-
nications aimed at fostering engagement and off ering reminders
about critical hazards and other risk factors. Supervisors must have
suffi cient communication and leadership skills. So, the network of
responsibility for lone worker safety is actually much wider than it
might initially appear. While every person may be an island, de-
veloping an archipelago of lone workers, supervisors, and organi-
zational leaders can ensure that no employee is truly left stranded
on their own.
Ray Prest is the Director of Marketing at SafeStart, a company
focused on human factors solutions that reduce preventable deaths
and injuries on and off the job. Ray has educated people about safety
and human factors management for over 20 years.
46 Occupational Health & Safety | APRIL/MAY 2025 www.ohsonline.com