Ask ten managers to define a "lone worker" and you'll often get ten answers about engineers up telegraph poles or night-shift security guards. Those are lone workers — but so is the support worker doing a home visit, the delivery driver on a long round, the shop assistant opening up alone, and the office administrator who stays late after everyone else has gone home. If you employ people, the odds are good that some of them work alone at least some of the time, and that has real implications for your duty of care.
The straightforward definition
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) describes lone workers as those who work by themselves without close or direct supervision. That deliberately covers a lot of ground. The defining feature isn't the job title or the industry — it's that, at a given moment, no colleague is present to notice if something goes wrong and raise the alarm.
It helps to think in terms of situations rather than roles. The same person can move in and out of lone working across a single shift: a care worker is not alone in the office at handover, but is alone in a client's home an hour later.
People who are lone workers more often than you'd think
- Fixed-location, single-staff sites — someone opening or closing a shop, a receptionist on a quiet reception, a caretaker on an otherwise empty site.
- Mobile and field staff — engineers, surveyors, delivery drivers, meter readers, agricultural workers.
- Visiting professionals — housing officers, district nurses, social workers, estate agents attending viewings.
- Out-of-hours workers — cleaners, maintenance staff, and anyone routinely working before or after core hours.
Why lone working changes the risk picture
Working alone rarely creates a brand-new hazard. What it does is remove the safety net. A trip on a staircase is a minor incident when a colleague is nearby; the same trip can become serious if the person is unconscious for hours before anyone realises. Lone working stretches the time between "something has gone wrong" and "someone knows about it" — and that gap is where most of the harm accumulates.
The risks worth thinking through usually fall into a few groups:
- Medical events — a fall, a seizure, an allergic reaction, or a sudden illness with no one on hand to help or call for aid.
- Violence and aggression — particularly for anyone entering members of the public's homes, handling money, or enforcing rules.
- Environmental and task hazards — confined spaces, work at height, machinery, or driving, where the consequences of a mistake are magnified by isolation.
- Simply going unaccounted for — the quiet failure where no one is sure whether a worker finished safely, because no one was expecting to hear from them.
Lone working is not automatically high-risk. A lone administrator in a locked office is in a very different position from a lone engineer in a substation. The job is to assess the actual situation, not to treat every solo task as a crisis.
Your duty of care in a nutshell
Employers have the same core responsibility to lone workers as to everyone else: so far as is reasonably practicable, keep them safe. In practice that means you should be able to answer three questions honestly for any lone-working situation:
- Have we assessed what could go wrong when this person is alone?
- Have we put sensible controls in place — and would we know promptly if one failed?
- If a worker needed help or simply didn't check in, how quickly would a real person find out and respond?
The first question is a risk assessment exercise. The second and third are about the systems you rely on day to day — scheduled welfare check-ins, a way to raise an alarm, and an escalation route that reliably reaches a person who can act.
Where to start
You don't need a large programme to make a real difference. Start by listing the situations in which your people work alone, note which carry meaningful risk, and be honest about how you'd currently find out if one of them went quiet. For many organisations, the uncomfortable answer is "we probably wouldn't, at least not for hours" — and closing that gap is the single most valuable thing you can do.
If you'd like to see what a modern approach looks like in practice, our how it works page walks through scheduled check-ins, alerts, and escalation end to end, and our pricing is built to be proportionate whether you're protecting five people or five hundred.
