The Shared Responsibility of Lone Worker Safety
Technology can help lone workers stay in communication and signal for help—but only leadership, communication, and engagement can prevent incidents before they happen.
There’s an old saying that every man is an island. In the context of workplace safety, that’s true for some more than for others.
In many companies, people have a veritable team of safety managers, shift supervisors, and co-workers looking out for them. Organizations with a proactive approach to safety have safety professionals who analyze incident data and work teams that discuss hazards at tailgate talks, all in an effort to keep each other safe. Even at companies with a terrible safety track record, there is bound to be someone nearby who can signal for aid if there’s an injury requiring medical attention.
Not so for lone workers. Working on their own, often remotely and far from help, lone workers cannot count on a co-worker to remind them to wear their PPE. They cannot rely on the vital human factors management technique of paying attention to the actions of others, such as noticing someone yawn, to help them hone in on the need to mitigate their own fatigue. They cannot expect a supervisor to intervene when they notice an injury about to happen. And when an incident does occur, a lone worker has to call for help on their own—if they can.
And so an entire industry has cropped up around lone worker safety. There now exists a host of technological solutions from wearable devices and GPS tracking to check-in systems and emergency buttons, all run through a variety of platforms and monitoring centers. These devices are meant to give supervisors the ability to monitor lone workers, and to grant those remote employees the ability to ask for help when they need it.
These are important safety tools, to be sure. But someone in a remote environment is still on their own, no matter how many satellite signals ping back and forth to indicate whether they’re doing fine or in distress. It’s fantastic that lone workers can call for help when they need it, and the ability to do so can save lives. However, remote monitoring is unable to reduce the risk of an incident occurring in the first place. Status updates from employees in the field are lagging indicators, and lone workers are still all alone on their island.
The first steps to lone worker safety look a lot like the basic safety practices in most workplaces: identify hazards, conduct risk assessments, provide the appropriate protective equipment, develop procedures, and make arrangements to mitigate the risk of injury, all while accounting for the unique characteristics of solo work.
These and other best practices should, of course, form the backbone of a lone worker safety program. Done properly, they can account for a good portion of the dangers that lone workers face every day. But proper procedures and risk assessments aren’t enough to fully keep people safe when they’re out there alone. We know that engagement plays a massive role in injury rates, with Gallup finding that workers with low levels of engagement experience 64 percent more incidents than their highly engaged counterparts. You can do almost everything right with lone worker safety, but if you don’t have a plan to keep employees engaged, then you don’t have a plan that will keep them truly safe.
Every employee should have a supervisor or manager of some kind, and lone workers are no different. When people are isolated from other employees, contact with their supervisor may look a little different, but the core principles are the same.
Frequent communication is key. In a typical workplace, employees are constantly receiving information from their supervisors, from their co-workers, and from safety signs and displays. Because many of these inputs are missing for lone workers, it’s up to their supervisors to fill in the gaps.
The ideal form of safety communication is face-to-face or, barring that, a video or phone call, as it allows a supervisor to convey as much information as possible (via tone and body language), and it also humanizes the interaction. But as one recent white paper on safety leadership notes, there are other options, and supervisor/employee interactions “may occur face to face but can also include instant messaging, texts or whatever mode of connection is available if in-person conversation isn’t an option.”
Volume of communication matters, and so does quality. Lone workers have a job to do, and they don’t want to feel pestered while they’re doing it. Supervisors need to time their check-ins well, and must make the most of each interaction.
The timing matters because risk isn’t static—it fluctuates—and an employee who is hyper-focused one minute may lapse into fatigue the next. A lone worker who drags their feet at the start of the workday may, as time ticks by, rush to catch up, which ratchets up the chances that they overlook a key safety procedure. A good supervisor should know the tendencies of their employees and schedule their check-ins accordingly.
Workers also need to feel like they’re having a real two-way conversation with their supervisors. Salesforce Research discovered that workers who feel like they are being heard by management are four and a half times more likely to feel empowered—and as we’ve seen, there’s a direct link between engagement levels and safety outcomes.
But engaging conversations are a lot easier to plan for than to do. It can be challenging to get lone workers to open up on a phone call. One tactic is to approach it indirectly by steering the conversation toward safety topics where the lone worker can share their perspective. Storytelling about close calls, recent incidents, or past injuries is a great way to achieve several goals. It can bring certain risks front of mind. It can give supervisors an opportunity to see where a lone worker’s head is at. And it offers the worker a chance to share their experiences and get things off their chest. These conversations are also an effective method of highlighting key human factors that could compromise a lone worker’s safety.
More than almost any other type of employee, lone workers bear an outsized responsibility for their own safety. But just because they work alone doesn’t mean they should be left to their own devices. Supervisors should be in constant contact, with timely communications aimed at fostering engagement and offering reminders about critical hazards and other risk factors.
Of course, all of this requires supervisors to have sufficient communication and leadership skills. So, the network of responsibility for lone worker safety is actually much wider than it may initially appear, with safety managers and company leadership needing to ensure that supervisors are up to the task of keeping lone workers engaged. If they’re not, then some leadership skills development may be required. While every person may be an island, developing an archipelago of lone workers, supervisors, and organizational leaders can ensure that no employee is truly left stranded on their own.
This article originally appeared in the April/May 2025 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.