A lone worker can complete every scheduled check-in and still need more support with the working day. Alongside your contact and alarm arrangements, make time for a conversation about workload, priorities and staying connected to colleagues. A lone worker app can support the safety routine; a manager needs to ask the wider questions.
At a glance
- Agree regular opportunities to talk during working hours.
- Ask about practical demands and access to support.
- Follow through on changes and check whether they help.
Make direct contact part of the routine
HSE’s lone-working guidance for Great Britain highlights the difficulty of getting support when people work away from managers and colleagues. It recommends arrangements for direct contact and warns that poor contact can leave workers feeling isolated.
Agree a suitable way and time to talk, with enough privacy and attention for a useful discussion. Fit the frequency to the work and the person’s needs. Explain how to reach a manager between planned conversations, so support does not depend on waiting for the next appointment.
Practical example: a donation-sorting worker
Consider a charity employee who sorts donated clothes alone in a small back room while the manager works at another site. The lone-working arrangements could cover scheduled check-ins, but leave little opportunity to discuss changing priorities or hear the team’s updates.
The manager could agree a regular phone conversation during the employee’s working hours, at a point when sorting can safely pause. They could ask which tasks are difficult to complete, whether instructions are clear and whether the worker can get timely advice.
If the discussion identified more sorting than could reasonably fit into the available hours, the manager could review priorities, staffing or the flow of donations. Simply asking the worker to call more often would leave the workload unchanged. HSE’s Management Standards guidance on demands emphasises achievable work within agreed hours.
The manager could also arrange access to relevant team updates and opportunities to speak with colleagues. Each agreed change should have someone responsible for it and a date to check how it is working.
Where LoneApp forms part of the assessed arrangements, the worker could use its activity and check-in routine while the manager reviews recorded check-ins in the dashboard. The separate conversation would explore how the job is going. The lesson is to plan both practical contact and opportunities for support.
Use questions that lead to useful action
HSE’s Stress Talking Toolkit offers a starting point for conversations about work-related stress. It is guidance, and HSE makes clear that talking alone is not the whole approach: identified risks still need to be managed. Try prompts such as:
- Which part of the workload is hardest to manage in your available time?
- When you need advice, can you get it soon enough?
- Are you missing information or team contact that would help?
- What practical change should we try, and when will we review it?
Keep the safety routine clear
A planned manager conversation does not cancel scheduled check-ins or the agreed response to an alarm. LoneApp records check-ins, but those records cannot tell a manager everything about a worker’s workload or support needs.
LoneApp does not replace risk assessment, safe working or employer response arrangements, and does not include a staffed alarm receiving centre.
Put the next conversation in the diary
Next step: agree a regular conversation with each lone worker, choose one practical question to start with and set aside time to follow up the answer.