How Lone Worker Safety Monitoring Can Transform Your Organization

If your organization employs lone workers, we likely don’t need to tell you why lone worker safety is important. You probably have stories of your own. Working alone brings with it unique risks—so it’s critical that you implement safety measures to keep your people safe in any environment. For most organizations, the first step will be implementing a lone worker safety app. But what capabilities should you be looking for in this app? By far, the most important is lone worker safety monitoring. The most dangerous part of any lone worker’s job is precisely that: they are alone. Lone worker safety monitoring ensures that even though your lone workers are unaccompanied, they are never truly alone.

Lone worker and employee safety are important for more than just the obvious reasons. Here are a few interesting statistics on how employee perceptions of safety can impact job satisfaction and productivity:

• Health care expenditures at high-pressure companies are nearly 50% greater than at other organizations
• More than $500 billion is drained from the U.S. economy due to workplace stress
• 550 million workdays are lost each year due to employees feeling stressed at work
• 60-80% of workplace accidents are attributed to stress

Of course, stress can come in all forms–from management issues to job pressure and travel. But employees who don’t feel safe and protected while at work are under constant stress. This is often in addition to typical work stress, putting lone workers in a particularly vulnerable position. Once you put yourself in the shoes of your lone workers, you can start to see why it is so important to take active measures to keep them safe.

Creating a Culture of Safety Makes a Difference

An article from innovationmanagement.se discusses workplace safety and its connection to innovation.

“As strange as it may sound to some people, the best way to ensure that your workplace remains productive and encourages creativity is to focus on safety.”

At the most basic level, workplace safety is important for obvious reasons: avoiding costly accidents and injuries on the job. What many organizations don’t realize, though, is the trickle-down effect that a culture of safety can have. There are many more organizational benefits that will come from implementing lone worker safety monitoring. Just a few include:

• Peace of mind – Even if employees bemoan safety rules and regulations, this structure actually brings them peace of mind. It’s like raising a child. They may not love the rules their parents put into place, but every child psychologist will tell you that children actually want rules, because they make children feel safe. When people go to work each day, they want to feel safe.
• Employee appreciation – Employees who believe their employers are not taking their safety seriously often feel under-appreciated. When a company takes the time to put standardized safety guidelines and policies in place, it signals to every employee that their well-being matters and their efforts are appreciated.
• More engaged employees – Employee engagement is a big deal. There are a myriad of statistics that show how important it is to have engaged employees. One of the more surprising ones is that more engaged employees translate into 70% fewer safety accidents.

Companies that fail to give their employees the tools and support to ensure their safety are creating stress that inevitably affects job performance. Over the long term, issues like these are what lead to employee turnover.

Monitoring Lone Workers Brings Peace of Mind

As the saying goes, “It’s not a matter of if, but when.” Workplace accidents are often unavoidable, but it’s up to the organization to do whatever possible to minimize the chances. Don’t wait for a fatal accident to occur before initiating standardized safety procedures.

Also, the more dangerous the job, the more precautions you should take. Police and military-civil servants, for example, are in danger every day. So they are purposefully equipped with weapons and monitoring devices to ensure they are taking every precaution to stay alive.

For companies with lone workers, the top priority should be to invest in lone worker safety monitoring. When lone workers are remote, they shouldn’t feel like they are off the grid. If they know they are being monitored, they will be less stressed, less concerned with accidents, and more assured that if an accident does occur, help will be on the way immediately. This peace of mind works wonders for employee morale, productivity, and job satisfaction.

Ask the Right Questions

Having a strong and reliable lone worker safety monitoring system in place tells your employees that their safety is a top priority. How you monitor your employees may vary, but here are a few features to consider when evaluating different monitoring options:

• Does it offer a 24-hour emergency monitoring capability?
• Is it a mobile solution?
• Does it combine technologies: such as a wearable device, a mobile app, and an off-site monitoring team?
• Does it have a direct connection to first responders?
• Will the lone worker have to go through multiple steps to get help?

The key is to provide effortless aid to lone workers whenever they need it–night or day, even during weekends or holidays. Additionally, pay close attention to the steps it takes for your lone workers to trigger an alert. Asking an employee to log into their mobile device, find an app, wait for it to load, then find the “help” or call button is not enough. It might check the box for your organization, but it won’t give your lone workers peace of mind. They know that in an emergency, those extra steps just aren’t practical. Besides, even when your people are able to go through all those steps, they will add precious seconds to emergency response times.

AlertMedia’s Hands-Free Monitoring Solution

For employees to feel truly safe, they need to know they can call for help quickly with minimal effort. AlertMedia’s lone worker safety app is a “hands-free solution,” because all the user has to do is allow their timed session to expire. Once they do, our 24/7/365 monitoring service instantly receives the alert and dispatches law enforcement. In fact, they can provide immediate assistance even without exchanging words, because the mobile app uses GPS coordinates to give first responders the worker’s location. This is lone worker safety monitoring at its finest.

Companies can use a lone worker safety app like AlertMedia to mitigate risk, keep their lone workers safe, and provide an overall sense of security over the entire organization. If your safety protocols don’t include these capabilities, your employees are still in danger and are likely feeling the stress of it. Give them and your company peace of mind, knowing they are being monitored even when they are alone