When people think about workplace safety, they probably imagine busy factories, crazy construction sites, and even office spaces where someone is available if help is needed. There’s one group of workers who don’t have that luxury, though. These workers are out there, doing their jobs, with nobody around to notice if something goes wrong. The dangers these people face are different from the types that may surprise many companies.
How Working Alone Leads to Unique Dangers
When someone is working alone, the safety net protecting someone from any incidents or accidents is no longer available. It’s not like someone will be available to notice that something has gone wrong. Nobody will be available to call if anything out of the ordinary happens. There’s nobody to provide backup if a situation escalates. That means the risk profile is different from the types of situations that most safety programs usually deal with.
There are the obvious types of dangers that come to mind. A delivery driver dealing with an aggressive customer at a remote location, for instance. Or a maintenance worker falling off a ladder at a deserted office. But there are also less obvious dangers. A medical emergency that would otherwise be survivable becomes fatal when it takes hours for help to arrive. A minor equipment malfunction can develop into a major disaster if there’s no other person to assist.
The Communication Issues Most People Don’t Think About
Working alone presents another unique challenge when it comes to communication. With workers distributed in different locations or working at odd hours, the usual pop your head in and check methodology for checking in on their wellbeing does not apply.
Most companies try to address this challenge with check-in systems. This poses its own challenge. If a worker is supposed to check in at 2 PM and fails to do so, how long will it take before anyone realizes anything is wrong? What if the emergency happens at exactly 2:15 PM after the worker has just checked in? In that case, it could take hours before anybody is aware that anything is amiss.
Companies that want to protect staff working alone have systems in place that tailor the solution to the challenges their employees face instead of simply verifying that everything was okay at the time of the check-in.
The technology to do this is readily available in today’s world. Fall detection devices, inactivity monitoring devices, and rapid communication devices can all help people working alone. Yet, plenty of companies still use outdated systems that leave massive gaps in their protections.
Companies Make This Type of Low-Risk Assessment
This is one of the most dangerous assumptions companies make regarding workers operating alone. They presume that some types of work situations and environments are a “low-risk” environment.
Someone working alone in an office after hours seems like a low-risk situation. Nobody will be working with heavy machinery or handling dangerous materials.
Yet what if something happens? How will the employee cope with a medical emergency? How will they manage if an unauthorized person arrives at the office? What will happen if there is a fire and somebody gets trapped in the building? This may seem like an outlandish scenario. Yet it happens more often than most people think.
Field workers have even more variables to account for. Workers in social services working alone in the field, real estate agents showing houses to prospective buyers alone, and surveyors also working in the field all encounter unpredictable field conditions, no matter where they may be working.
The Impact of Working Alone Is Psychological
When it comes to protecting people who work alone, most companies only consider physical dangers. Yet there are also psychological dangers inherent to working alone that also affect a worker’s general wellbeing and their physical safety.
The fact that there is nobody else around alters how people behave and make decisions. In some cases, people working alone become too cautious, which reduces efficiency in how they do their jobs. Other times, workers who work alone push through challenges they should not be dealing with because they do not want to seem “nonchalant” or unable to handle working alone.
There is also the fact that working alone creates an anxiety level that people also need to account for when making decisions. They may miss things they need to pick up on because part of their mind is always assessing their environment for potential risks they may need to address.
The Solutions That Protect Workers Operating Without Backup
Companies that do a good job protecting workers who work alone have some things in common. They don’t merely check boxes in a compliance framework but actually consider what their workers need to remain safe while working alone.
The solutions that protect people focus on the right risk assessments; not generic risk assessments that do not cater to specific needs by a worker or the type of work being conducted. A healthcare worker visiting a home will have a different set of risks than someone stationed at a remote monitoring station.
When it comes to communication systems, these need to be efficient as well. Implementing a system that becomes another burden on lone workers does not help anyone. If scheduling check-in times becomes too much for employees, they will skip it.
Training is also crucial, but it needs to make sense. People working alone will need to be trained in how to deal with situations they are facing when nobody else is around to assist them.
All these concerns may lead to practical skills such as first aid and de-escalation tactics, or guidelines on when a worker should abandon a task instead of attempting to complete it alone.
The Legalities That Come with Working Alone
Federal legislation regarding workplace safety recognizes that workers who work alone have unique difficulties.
The legalities of these frameworks differ from industry to industry and state to state. However, one thing is consistent among all these frameworks: companies need documented systems in place for the protection of lone workers.
These systems need policies, procedures, and implementation methods, not merely procedural documents that nobody pays attention to. When something goes wrong, investigators want to know what protection measures were implemented or whether they were enough to contain this particular situation.
Steps Companies Have to Take
If someone were to come forward with their concerns about protecting people operating without backup, asking companies about processes, few would be able to respond to them adequately. They might have a policy in a compliance document somewhere but taking concrete steps? That’s usually not on their radar.
Developing a policy may be step one for some companies after reading this article, but it has proven ineffective as a company practice for many years.
Creating an effective plan for protecting lone workers requires periodic assessment.
In this case, documents are written; people are trained; then everybody moves on as if the issue has been resolved in its entirety. However, for proper protection, the company needs to continuously monitor such concerns without making it into an overly bureaucratic process.
The areas companies can focus on to protect their lone workers effectively include:
- Regularly assessing changes in roles. New roles can emerge from existing ones that introduce new risks.
- Steering clear of boilerplate documents, obtain feedback from actual lone workers on what would help keep them safe
- Understanding new and emerging tools that make protection easier than ever before
- Choosing the right tools instead of the ones that create complications for the company
Companies doing this properly view protecting lone workers as a continual concern rather than a fleeting project. They understand that when their employees operate without backup, they require specialized protection and allocate resources appropriately.
