Top Five Lone Worker Policy Tips

Working with companies daily from all walks of life on monitoring their lone workers, gives GetHomeSafe a unique insight into what makes working alone policy a success. Regardless of your industry or health and safety legal requirements there are some simple things to covered off.

Here are our top five tips on making your lone worker policy a success.

1. What is working alone?

Clearly define what working alone means for your organisation in one sentence.  One of our favourite definitions is:

“when you cannot reasonably expect help from those nearby in a timely and effective manner”.

Your local H&S regulations may also have a definition you can use, so it is worth checking.

2. Who decides that you are a lone worker?

Once you have a definition of what lone working is for your organisation, it is also a good idea to assign the interpretation of the definition to someone with authority.

Like most definitions, your definition of being a lone worker will likely be open to interpretation, so it is important to clarify who gets the final say on what actually is considered working alone.

3. Examples of being a lone worker

To make interpretation of your lone worker policy easy and quick for everyone, why not make a list of situations of what is considered to be working alone under your definition and what isn’t.

4. When can you work by yourself?

At some point the risks of work will reach a limit where your organisation decides we don’t want you doing that job alone.  Your lone worker policy is the document that controls when it is acceptable to undertake work by yourself (if at all), so here is the place to clearly mandate what is the level of acceptable risk is when working alone.  Why not support this definition with examples of when working alone is clearly acceptable, like afterhours office work and what clearly isn’t, like confined space work.

5. Keep it simple stupid and use language everyone can understand.

We are big believers that engagement is one of the biggest health and safety challenges all workers have.  Policy and engagement don’t often go together in the same sentence, but there is no need to over complicate your lone worker policy and try not to bamboozle people with big words or long sentences.  Try use the KISS writing technique of keep it simple stupid.

That’s all from us, we hope this helps with your lone worker policy writing journey.  We highly recommend you seek independent advice on compliance with your local health and safety legal requirements.  If you have a top tip of your own you think should be added to the list, please let us know.

8 June 2021