Lone Worker Device: Which is the best to improve your personal safety?
Specifying a lone worker device that works best for your team and the wider organisation can be key to successful adoption and ongoing personal safety solution usage.
Lone worker safety and the wellbeing of remote personnel are increasingly high on the agenda for employers that want to meet their duty of care to staff and protect their reputation and associated brand equity.
When selecting a lone worker device for your organisation, there are several considerations any specifier may find useful to think about. Here, we discuss a few of the pertinent things a solution specifier may decide to investigate further when reviewing lone worker safety devices.
A Lone worker device facilitates the wider solution
The lone worker device is often the most memorable part of a personal safety solution for many users. This is often understandable, and the experience a lone worker device delivers will often inform the user’s opinion – primarily because most users will (hopefully) not experience a genuine ‘Red Alert’ situation.
A personal safety solution is often judged on the response elicited by the device for the lone worker. The personal safety device is purely the enabler that helps facilitate a solution being delivered – primarily safety benefits for the user, and operational benefits for department managers and the wider organisation.
Learn more information about SoloProtect personal safety solutions.
Does the lone worker device fit the application of use?
A lone worker device’s form factor is often a key consideration in influencing a user’s adoption. It often helps the process if it is aesthetically appealing, but it is also very important that a device’s physical characteristics suit the application of usage.
The nature of work being carried out will have the greatest bearing on whether a lone worker device integrates into a user’s day-to-day routine and fits around existing work apparel.
- Is the personal safety device easy to charge?
- Is it simple to use and easy to understand?
- Is it a modern device that is software-driven, with an engaging User Interface (U.I.)?
- Does the device look appropriate within the context of a user’s job role and environment?
If discretion is required, a wearable ID badge like the SoloProtect ID Touch may be more suitable than a smartphone application like SoloProtect Mobile. Likewise, someone who typically works at height with a harness, won’t want to use a device on a lanyard around their neck and may prefer a belt-connecting lone worker device like the SoloProtect Shield. And the aesthetic purists among your user groups may opt for the clean lines of the SoloProtect Curve.
Our range of SoloProtect lone worker safety devices and applications are shown below:
Is it easy to allocate lone worker devices to my team?
The time spent administering a lone worker solution, and how to balance that internally is often an important part of the set-up and ongoing solution management.
SoloProtect Insights, a tool for total lone worker management, allows users to be created and grouped by department or division, to reflect your organisational structure. Here, a solution administrator or multiple team leaders are empowered to assign lone worker devices and applications to users, to send training to personnel and to create escalation lists nominated for SoloProtect to contact in the event of a genuine alarm, when attempting to establish a lone worker device user’s location or the nature of an event.
What do my colleagues think?
Involving colleagues at the outset of selecting a lone worker device can assist the process of adoption, and feed into any personal safety solution trial.
SoloProtect can help you consider any assessment period for supporting this with both policy and assessment to support any business case for implementation.
Contact SoloProtect for more information about:
- Making a business case for a lone worker solution
- Lone Worker Policy
- Conducting a lone worker team assessment
What technology does the lone worker device have?
And more importantly, does the device help my team to reduce the risks they face and improve their personal safety?
- Is the device delivering greater connectivity through 4G Network enablement?
- Are my team empowered to select Man-Down (auto incapacitation) alarm functionality where an environmental risk may need to be reduced?
- Is there a particular concern about conditions within an environment – that may require a lone worker device to be dust-tight and rainproof?
- Is there suitable location technology within the service that will assist the location of my team, in an emergency?
Monitoring your lone worker devices
A comprehensively supported lone worker device solution is supported 24/7, 365 by a Monitoring Centre. SoloProtect operates an in-house Alarm Receiving Centre that handles all UK-based lone worker alarms.
SoloProtect remains an end-to-end solution provider – delivering every facet of our personal safety solution, with almost twenty years of experience in the lone worker industry.
Lone Worker Device reporting
SoloProtect Insights allows swift onboarding, increased automation, and timely data visibility to support review processes. This reduces management review time, avoids subjective reporting and negates the need for large monthly reporting actions by a single administrator or department heads across the organisation.
