Is Your Lone Worker Safety Strategy Fit for Purpose in 2025?

It’s a question all businesses with workers operating alone need to ask themselves: are our lone worker safety policies and procedures up to scratch?

The growing popularity of remote work has made this question more relevant – and urgent – than ever.

It’s easy to ask the question, but answering it and addressing any shortcomings is another story.

After all, lone working is multifaceted and can involve a disparate set of risks and hazards in a workplace or on a worksite.

Below, we see how you can identify and address gaps in a lone worker safety regime.

Honesty is the Best Policy

If a lone worker isn’t up to scratch, it’s best to own up so you can begin to address the issue.

Papering over cracks or playing the blame game when things go wrong is only going to breed an atmosphere of mistrust and undermine staff morale.

By undertaking frank and open discussions with the workers who routinely go out on a job alone, you can get a handle on their issues and concerns.

The HSE found that workplaces where employees feel encouraged to raise health and safety concerns have 14% accident rates, compared to 26% where they don’t.

Anonymous Surveys

One of the most effective ways a business can find out how well a safety regime is working is to conduct an anonymous survey among its staff.

Understandably, employees can sometimes be reluctant to be open and honest with bosses, especially if what they have to say isn’t complimentary.

By anonymising the feedback, you take the worry out of sharing feedback by allowing staff to speak freely and candidly.

This will help a company better identify shortcomings in its lone-worker safety strategy and also allow it to gauge staff morale and sentiment at the same time.

Benchmarking

Another important aspect of ensuring the efficacy of a safety regime is to constantly monitor and assess the risks of all work undertaken for a company.

In fact, in the UK, this is a legal requirement.

Under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations (1999), employers have a legal duty to assess the risks posed by a worksite to their employees, including those who work alone.

The information gleaned from the risk assessment should be at the heart of any benchmarking efforts, as it can be used to establish a set of metrics against which to measure the success of a lone worker safety regime.

Monitoring & Supervision

At the heart of any modern lone worker safety strategy worthy of the name should lie technology.

Technology allows a company to conduct more sophisticated, data-driven benchmarking of its lone worker safety policy to ensure it’s fit for purpose.

For example, ANT Telecom’s Aspect Link and associated Atlas SOS devices and apps support benchmarking your lone-worker safety regime in several key ways:

• Automated Alarm Logging and Reporting: All alarms, check-ins, and safety incidents are automatically logged by the system. This allows it to generate performance analytics, including response times, alert counts, and missed check-ins to help companies benchmark safety system effectiveness.
• Audio Streaming and Incident Verification: Live audio from triggered alarms allows safety bosses to assess the seriousness of incidents and response times, providing qualitative benchmarking of how well protocols are followed and executed.
• GPS and Indoor Location Data: Worker-worn safety devices, like mobile apps and handheld devices, track a worker’s location via GPS, Wi-Fi, and indoor beacons, allowing for more accurate benchmarking and making risk identification and worksite monitoring more pinpointed and effective.
• User Compliance Monitoring: The system’s main control dashboard displays real-time user activity, helping benchmark check-in compliance rates and flag underuse, training gaps and risky worksite activity.

Conclusion

It’s a question that has taken increasing saliency over the past decade or so for swathes of businesses – are our safety strategies fit for purpose?

This question is especially urgent as more and more of us migrate away from the office post-COVID.

As we have shown, to answer this question  in the affirmative, a clever mix of old-fashioned risk assessment and cutting-edge lone-worker safety technology is required.

*This is a collaboration post