It’s estimated that there are around 11 million “hidden” lone workers across North America, meaning workers are facing significant unchecked hazards, exposing businesses to productivity, legal, and financial risks.

This makes it clear that there’s a discovery and monitoring problem in lone worker management that needs to be resolved as a matter of urgency.

In this guide, we outline eight practical methods of identifying lone workers as well as the frequency of lone work across your organization.

Ensure leadership teams understand what lone working is and why it’s dangerous

The most important step to identifying lone workers in your organization is to ensure that you and your leadership teams understand what qualifies as lone working. If you want to find something, you first need to know what you’re looking for.

Lone working is defined as any work carried out without close or direct supervision. In other words, if a task is carried out in an environment where no one else is around to offer immediate support when needed, it’s lone work.

Whoever carries out these tasks is classed as a lone worker.

The task doesn’t have to be particularly risky, nor does it have to be geographically isolated to count as lone working. Lone working means isolated, not necessarily off-site.

Learn more about lone working in our dedicated guide: Lone worker safety: What qualifies as “lone working” – and what are the risks?

Educate your team on lone working

Businesses often rely on employees self-reporting about lone working. After all, those carrying out the work are best positioned to speak on the subject. However, self-reporting is only an effective strategy if your team understands what lone working is and the risks at play.

If an employee doesn’t recognize that they are a lone worker, or carry out lone work as part of their broader tasks while working, they will not report as such. They are now a hidden lone worker, simply due to a lack of knowledge.

Ensuring staff have a robust understanding of the definition of lone working, and how working without immediate assistance vastly increases risk exposure, ensures they can confidently report their status to managers. In turn, management can organize appropriate support.

Deliver employee lone working surveys

Once your employees have a clear grasp of lone working as a concept and how it impacts their vulnerability, internal surveys can be an effective way to monitor who requires additional support and safety training.

To reduce the chances of lone workers going unaccounted for, deliver the survey to every employee, rather than those who you already assume are lone workers.

As well as more obvious queries to identify high-risk lone workers, the survey should ask questions that help shine a light on even minor instances of lone working. For example, questions like…

•  ‘How often do you work without a colleague in the same room or immediate environment?’; and
  
• ‘Do your duties require you to start your shift before others arrive, or remain on-site after others have left for the day?’

… give a more detailed picture of the scale of lone working across your organization. 

These types of questions also reinforce that lone working doesn’t always mean working alone in the field or that it only applies when carrying out noted high-risk tasks.

To ensure your data is actionable, these surveys should move beyond a simple “Yes/No” format and instead ask employees to comment on the frequency, duration, and accessibility of lone working tasks. 

You can help this process along by using a scale rather than asking for employees to use their own words, although there should be space for employees to comment where they feel necessary.

If your survey is detailed enough, rather than providing a basic headcount of lone workers, it should guide a detailed categorization of lone workers. Here’s an example of the categories you may use:

• Primary lone workers – Working alone is a core part of their daily job
• Intermittent lone workers – They are alone for 1-2 hours daily or on specific days
• Incidental lone workers – They are only alone during rare events or during highly specific tasks

Make regular lone work reporting a key line manager responsibility

Line managers are the leadership staff closest to front-line workers and are therefore a key resource when attempting to integrate lone worker identification strategies into safety procedures.

When educated on the nature and risks of lone working, they can easily label tasks as lone work and serve as a direct go-between between leadership and large teams of front-line staff. This can lay the foundation for tailored risk assessment and personalised support measures.

Asking line managers to report on lone working tasks can also create a failsafe when lone workers themselves fail to realize or report that lone working is planned or has already taken place. For example, new starters may not feel confident enough to report lone working, or may not yet fully grasp how the concept applies to their role.

Implement activity-based time tracking

If your existing time-tracking or project management software permits, add a solo work checkbox to tasks. Employees can then report lone working frictionlessly. You may also be able to use your software to tally solo hours worked per worker.

Then, beyond headcount, you have access to a breakdown of lone working frequency per lone worker, which can be used to apply risk levels and guide supportive measures.

Carry out regular job role audits

While surveys and time-tracking rely on employee input, a job role audit is a top-down structural review that looks at the core requirements of a position rather than the person currently in it. This helps identify roles that are inherently prone to isolation, even if they aren’t traditionally viewed as field roles.

To conduct an effective audit, break down each job description into specific tasks and evaluate them against three criteria:

• Location vs occupancy: Does the role require presence in low-traffic areas like stockrooms, walk-in freezers, or remote utility sites where natural surveillance is low?
• Temporal isolation: Does the role involve “bridge” shifts or weekend work where the building occupancy drops significantly, leaving the individual as the sole occupant?
• Third-party exposure: Does the role involve meeting alone with members of the public or clients in non-company-controlled environments (e.g., real estate agents or social workers)?

By auditing the role rather than the individual, you ensure that when a new hire steps into a position, their lone-working status is already flagged in their onboarding and risk assessment.

This proactive approach prevents “hidden” lone workers from slipping through the cracks during periods of high turnover or departmental restructuring.

Review security access logs

If your business has secure facilities where employees use security cards to gain access to discrete areas of the site, you can cross-reference access data with payroll and scheduling data to extract on-site lone worker insights.

You’d be looking for instances where only one person is clocked into a specific zone or building at a given time.

While it requires some hands-on data analysis, this is a practical approach in that your organization already has a system in place that can be highly effective for identifying lone workers.

Furthermore, this method provides an objective, fully data-driven lone work identification analysis. It can reveal after-hours or weekend shift lone working that management may have overlooked, and it doesn’t rely on employee self-reporting.

Don’t forget your home workers

If any of your team work from home, they are technically lone workers, so don’t forget to include them on your list. Consider, as well, that some workers may only occasionally work from home. During these work periods, they, too, are lone workers.

While it’s trickier to keep homeworkers safe than their on-site counterparts, there are ways to ensure they receive the same care and attention. At Cardinus, for example, we deliver virtual ergonomic assessments and safety eLearning courses so organizations can reach staff anywhere with essential risk analysis and safety knowledge.

Cardinus stands ready to support your lone workers

If you’re struggling to implement lone worker identification strategies, we can provide support via our Safety Consultation services.

Once you’re confident that you have a robust log of lone workers and the lone work they carry out on behalf of your organization, the next step is to provide tailored lone worker training.

Our interactive Lone Worker eLearning course can be delivered at the push of button and is customizable, ensuring all content is highly relevant to scenarios your lone workers actually encounter.

If you’d like more information about lone workers and how we can support yours, please contact Cardinus today.