Lone working policy: knowing someone got home

A lone working policy covers anyone who works without close or direct supervision — a care worker visiting homes, an engineer on a client site, a shop assistant closing alone, a researcher in a building at ten at night. Lone working is not illegal anywhere and rarely needs to be prohibited. What it needs is a decision, written down, about which tasks are acceptable alone, what happens if the person does not report back, and who is going to notice.

What a lone working policy has to decide

• Which roles and tasks are covered, including the ones people do not think of as lone working — early starts, weekend cover, a colleague staying late.
• What is never done alone: work at height, confined spaces, high-voltage work, certain client visits, handling significant cash.
• The check-in arrangement: how often, by what method, and with whom by name or by role.
• The escalation: what happens at the first missed check-in, what happens at the second, and who has the authority to call emergency services.
• Training and competence, since a lone worker cannot ask the colleague next to them.
• Provision for people at higher risk — new or expectant mothers, young workers, anyone with a medical condition that could become an emergency.

The check-in that actually works

1. Make it low-effort. A check-in that takes two minutes will be skipped when the day is busy, and the days it is skipped are the days it mattered.
2. Make the receiver a role, not a person, or the arrangement fails whenever that individual is on leave.
3. Set an explicit deadline rather than a rough expectation — "by 18:00" is actionable, "at the end of the day" is not.
4. Define the escalation before it happens, with phone numbers and the address of where the person was going, because at that moment nobody should be searching for either.
5. Test it. Miss a check-in deliberately once and see how long it takes for someone to notice; that number is your real response time.

The failure nobody plans for is the end of the day, not the middle. A worker who finishes a final visit at six and drives home has left the arrangement, and if the check-out step does not exist, nobody discovers a problem until the next morning. Most lone-working systems have a start and no end.

Assessing the risk honestly

• The risk is not only violence. Falls, medical emergencies, road incidents and simply being unable to summon help account for most of it.
• Consider whether the person can be reached — a rural site with no signal changes the entire arrangement.
• Ask the workers. They know which visits feel wrong, and that information rarely reaches a policy written centrally.
• Where the concern is aggression, record incidents and near misses per location; a pattern justifies a change that an individual complaint will not.
• Feed anything serious into the same incident report process as everything else, so lone-working risk is visible in the overall picture rather than in a separate file.

On a multi-site operation the paperwork behind this stops fitting in folders. EHS compliance software keeps incidents, assessments, permits and competence records together, with one action list so nothing closes on a promise.

Where the arrangement lives

Ettex Records keeps the lone working register as dated records — who is out, where, expected back when, checked in at what time — so an overdue check-in is a visible state rather than something a colleague has to remember to wonder about. The written policy belongs with the health and safety policy it sits under. Ettex is not a lone-worker alarm system: there is no panic button, no automated escalation and no location tracking, and where the risk warrants those, buy a dedicated device. What this replaces is the whiteboard nobody updated and the text message nobody read.