Lone Worker Policy: What It Needs to Cover

A lone worker policy is one of those documents that sounds like a nice-to-have until something goes wrong and there's nothing written down about how the business manages the risk. If you have anyone working alone, whether that's a maintenance engineer visiting sites solo, a care worker doing home visits, a shop assistant on a late shift, or an office worker who's last out the building, you need a policy that sets out how you manage that risk, not just a sentence in the handbook saying "be careful."

Here's what a lone worker policy actually needs to cover to be worth the paper it's written on.

Define who counts as a lone worker in your business

Start by being specific about who the policy applies to. Lone working isn't just about people who work completely by themselves all day. It covers anyone who works without close or direct supervision, including someone who works alone for part of a shift, someone in a building with other people but no one nearby if something happens, and mobile or remote workers such as delivery drivers, engineers, sales reps, and home visiting staff. A policy that only thinks about the obvious cases (the night security guard) and misses the less obvious ones (the admin worker who opens up alone at 7am) has a gap in it.

Set out the risk assessment process

The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require employers to assess risks to lone workers just as they would for any other work activity. The policy should explain how and when lone working risk assessments happen: before someone starts a lone working role, when the nature of the work changes, and periodically after that. The assessment itself should look at the specific hazards of the task and location, the individual's experience and medical suitability for working alone, and whether the risks can be controlled to an acceptable level or whether lone working shouldn't happen at all for that task.

It's worth being honest in the policy that some tasks are not suitable for a lone worker, regardless of controls. Work with a high risk of violence, tasks needing more than one person for safety reasons (certain manual handling, some confined space work), and jobs where a worker couldn't summon help if something went wrong are all situations where the answer might be "this isn't done alone," not "here's how we manage it."

Communication and check-in arrangements

This is the part of a lone worker policy that gets used the most day to day, so it needs to be specific rather than vague. It should cover:

• How often lone workers are expected to check in, and by what method (call, text, app, lone worker device)
• What happens if a scheduled check-in is missed, including who is responsible for following it up and how quickly
• How a lone worker raises the alarm if they're in danger, and who receives that alert
• Out of hours arrangements, if lone working happens outside normal office hours when fewer people are available to respond

A policy that says "lone workers should check in regularly" without defining regularly, or naming who's responsible for noticing a missed check-in, isn't actually a system, it's a hope.

Training and information for lone workers

People working alone need to know how to recognise when a situation is becoming unsafe, how to de-escalate if they can, and when to remove themselves rather than continue. The policy should set out what training lone workers receive before they start working alone, covering the specific risks of their role (personal safety, manual tasks they might have to do without assistance, first aid arrangements when no one else is present) and how to use whatever check-in or alarm system the business has in place.

Equipment and technology

If the business provides lone worker devices, apps, or other technology, the policy should state what's provided, who it's provided to, and what the minimum standard is (battery checks, GPS accuracy, how alerts are escalated). If the arrangement is simpler, such as a phone call at set times, that should be stated plainly too. What matters is that the policy describes what's actually in place, not an aspirational system that doesn't match reality.

Review and incident reporting

The policy should say how lone working incidents or near misses are reported and how they feed back into reviewing the arrangements. If a check-in is missed, or a lone worker reports feeling unsafe on a job, that should trigger a review of the risk assessment for that task or location, not just a note in a file. A lone worker policy that's never updated after an incident isn't doing its job.

Getting the policy right

A generic lone worker policy pulled from a template site and never adapted tends to miss the specifics that make it usable: who your actual lone workers are, what check-in method genuinely fits how your business operates, and who is actually responsible for responding. It's worth building the policy around how your teams really work, not a generic version of what a lone worker policy is supposed to look like.

If you'd rather have a health and safety policy written properly for your business, covering lone working and the rest of your legal requirements in one document, you can see the health and safety policy writing service here.