Lone working on site: the employer’s duties and how to meet them

The employer’s duty with lone working is to give the worker a way to call for help and contact with someone who will notice that something has happened. This applies to anyone who works alone: a night security guard, a patrol officer, an operator at a remote workstation. A work phone alone doesn’t cover it, because an unconscious person can’t make a call. That is why the usual approach is a duty to check in at regular intervals and a procedure that kicks in when a check-in doesn’t arrive.

A check-in requirement is easy to introduce in a policy. The harder question is who will notice that a check-in hasn’t arrived, and how.

Why a policy on its own is not enough

A typical lone working procedure says the worker must report to the duty officer every hour. That looks like a complete solution until the moment it has to be enforced. The duty officer is working too, and nobody sits there with a watch ticking off twenty check-ins a shift. And a missed check-in always looks the same: you can’t tell “forgot” from “lying on the floor of the switch room”, even though the difference is fundamental and is counted in minutes.

Nor is there any record after the event. You can’t establish whether the procedure was followed or just hung on the wall, and that is the first thing an inspection after an accident asks about. A policy describes what should happen, but it doesn’t create a mechanism that catches a missed check-in.

How automatic check-in monitoring works

A system for lone working reverses the direction of attention: a missed check-in reports itself, and nobody has to watch the clock.

1. The post gets a schedule that sets how often the worker has to confirm that everything is fine.
2. The worker checks in with a single action, in an application window at the workstation or on a terminal. The simpler the confirmation, the better the chance it becomes a habit.
3. A missing confirmation within the time window triggers an alert, sent by text message and email to designated people.
4. Everything stays in the log: who, when and whether it was on time. The log is proof that the procedure worked, not just that it existed.

In TraxSystem, a post with schedule mode switched on but no schedules loaded is treated as off duty, so the system doesn’t expect check-ins from it and raises no alarm. This is deliberate, because otherwise every unstaffed post would generate false alerts every hour. The consequence is easy to overlook: a post without a schedule is a post without supervision, so check this at implementation acceptance.

What the security manager sees in TraxSystem

On the dashboard the security manager has a list of posts, with the status of the last check-in and the time to the next one beside each, so one glance replaces phoning round. The staffing list works as a lookup list: you can see who is on which post today without copying names from the rota.

After the shift there is a history that answers the questions asked after an incident: when the last check-in was, how long the silence lasted, who received the alert and when.

Fall detection devices and risk assessment

TraxSystem doesn’t detect falls, lack of movement or loss of consciousness. It has no impact sensors, doesn’t analyse body position and doesn’t replace a personal safety device. It detects a missing confirmation within the expected time, and that is where its role ends. If the risk assessment for the job calls for a fall detection device, you will need a separate hardware solution, with check-in monitoring as a complement to it.

This description of the check-in mechanism is not legal advice. The scope of duties for lone working follows from the occupational risk assessment prepared for the specific job, so confirm it with your health and safety team.

Questions and answers

See also: Post check-ins: how monitoring a lone worker works in practice · A worker missed a check-in: what should happen next