Your lone working employees may face an array of risks and the impact of these risks can be more severe because of the fact they are alone. It’s important that lone worker protection isn’t just one element on your risk assessment document but that there’s a considered end-to-end process around how you manage and mitigate risks to your lone working staff.

 

To ensure you’ve addressed lone worker protection, just follow these 5 Simple Steps

 

Step 1: Assess the risks

There are many different risk profiles of a lone working employee; the Health and Safety Executive outline 5 different types. Ensure you have assessed the risks for EACH type of lone worker:

• Working alone at a fixed base e.g. shop, factory, warehouse
• Work separately from others on the same premises or outside of normal working hours e.g. Cleaners, Security Officers
• Working from home
• Work away from a fixed base e.g. Social Workers, Sales Reps, Engineers, HGV Drivers
• Volunteers carrying out work alone on behalf of charities/voluntary organisations

 

Step 2: Mitigate risks

Create safe systems of work for your lone working employees and ensure you communicate a clear lone working policy they can follow to keep themselves safe.

 

Step 3: Implement control measures

To mitigate certain risks, you will need to introduce control measures. These could be policies where employees must check in at certain points, follow a specific set of activities, or use protective equipment and technology. It’s essential to clearly communicate why these are being introduced and explain the employee’s role in the success of the control measures to reduce their risks.

 

Step 4: Training

As a minimum, lone working employees should be trained on the risks and hazards they face; their rights and responsibilities as a lone worker; and how to assess risks in a changing environment (Dynamic Risk Assessment). Dependent on the risk profile, you may also need to provide additional training on areas such as Conflict Resolution, Travel Safety or Lone Worker Solution Usage.

 

Step 5: On-going Management

To ensure the successful protection of your lone working employees, the policies and control measures must be properly embedded within the organisation. This means compliance from all employees, and Department Managers and Team Leaders are key to achieving this. It’s essential they play their part in managing their teams’ compliance.

 

These are 5 Steps to Employee Protection, but the reality is it’s an ongoing process.

 

It’s essential to always be on the lookout for new or evolving risks. As risks change you must ensure you have the right mitigation and right control measures in place to keep your employees protected.

 

 

Download our 5 Steps to Employee Protection infographic here

 

For more information, please visit www.pickprotection.com