How To Keep Your Lone Workers Safe

It’s common knowledge that the success of most businesses stands on the efforts of their employees. As a result, if you want the business to be successful and to enjoy longevity, you need to keep your workers safe.

This can be especially tricky with lone workers, who often face a wide variety of serious hazards out in the field. That being said, with a number of emerging technologies and practices to assist with lone worker safety, it’s only getting easier.

Risk assessments

It’s simple really – you can’t protect someone from a hazard if you don’t know what they need protecting against. As a result, the first step in ensuring lone worker safety is to carry out in-depth risk assessments. These need to take into consideration both the tasks that will be performed and any environmental hazards, whether that’s bad weather or unpredictable individuals or wildlife.

Also read: How Tech Workers Can Keep Healthy

Maintain communication channels

Another thing that’s key to lone worker safety is ensuring ongoing communication. Lone workers need to be able to ask for help at all times, and there needs to be someone ready to listen out for their messages and calls.

In some cases, employees may not be able to call in a time of emergency. For these situations, it’s imperative that you have a well-thought-out lone worker alarm system, potentially with trip detection devices or other advanced monitors.

Safety training

While a lot of people talk about the benefits of technology when it comes to lone worker safety, technology is only one part of a complex puzzle. Another important thing to take care of is training, both for lone workers and the people who are supposed to be supporting them.

This training should aim to equip lone workers with the skills necessary to ensure their safety in the workplace, allowing them to handle a range of challenging situations. It should also contain training elements that show lone workers how best to use the technology they’re provided with – after all, tools are next to useless if you don’t know how to use them.

Practice protocols

It’s important to have emergency protocols in place, but you don’t want to only find out if those protocols actually work when an accident occurs. It’s a good idea to practice and prepare for emergency scenarios so that you can tweak your approach and update it as necessary.

This will allow both lone workers and response teams to become familiar with how to react in emergency scenarios, decreasing the probability that something goes wrong in the heat of the moment.

There’s clearly a lot that you can do to keep your lone workers safe – the advice listed above is crucial, but it barely scratches the surface. It’s important to recognize that the threats faced by lone workers are constantly shifting. It’s not an issue that you can fix once and for all, you need to remain prepared at all times for unexpected issues to crop up. By regularly conducting risk assessments and updating your safety procedures based on your findings, you can remain adaptive in the face of unpredictable environments.