Lone Worker Monitoring

What is a lone worker monitoring solution, and how does it help to boost operational efficiency and keep workers safe?

What is a lone worker monitoring?

Sometimes referred to as lone worker tracking, lone worker monitoring ensures your employees can easily call for help in an emergency situation and their location can be accessed to ensure assistance is sent to the right place.

Why invest in lone worker monitoring?

Lone workers are subject to increased social and environmental risk because there may not be someone in the vicinity to help them if an incident occurs.

Therefore, for employees who work alone or remotely, monitoring location is important for ensuring their safety, security, and wellbeing. It also demonstrates an employer’s duty of care commitments.

Furthermore, there are also significant penalties for not protecting lone workers and any organisation found to be negligent can face irreversible reputational brand damage.

A lone worker monitoring solution allows a lone worker to call for emergency help at the press of a button on a lone worker device or personal safety mobile app. In this instance, geolocation technology ensures the device, and hence the worker, can easily be located which is vital information for the emergency services or a manager.

However, using a combination of Latest Location and Working Status information, lone worker monitoring can also provide managers with operational benefits including:

Tracking the progress of deliveries (where location is a clear indicator),
Monitoring drivers who may be rushing and therefore causing a safety hazard to themselves and others,
Easily and efficiently transferring mobile workers to different locations based on worker availability and proximity,
Monitoring whether workers are available and in the right locations during their working hours, and
Clear visibility of overtime.

Why not take a look at our business case for investing in a lone worker solution?

How does lone worker monitoring work?

If a lone worker feels their personal safety is under threat, they can press the “Red Alert” button on their lone worker alarm.

This raises a 1-way call with the SoloProtect Monitoring Centre where specially trained operators will listen in to the situation and locate the user’s device using geolocation technology. The operator will then establish the severity of the incident and either alert the emergency services and/or the user’s escalation contacts (e.g. a manager or colleague).

Importantly, the operator will monitor the incident until the user has confirmed their safety. This includes updating the emergency services with additional information as necessary, making notes on the incident and capturing the audio. In the event of a serious incident, this evidence can be particularly useful in any legal proceedings and for use in any post-incident training.

You may find our blog useful: Panic alarms: traditional vs monitored.

In addition to the above, if the lone worker device detects that the user has fallen over due to an accident, health issue or act of violence, an “Incapacitation Alert” (or Man Down Alarm) with be raised. Through our Alarm Receiving Centre Monitoring, a 2-way call will be opened where the operator will talk to the user to try to establish what has happened and the level of assistance required. They will then initiate an appropriate response.

SoloProtect’s lone worker Monitoring Centre

SoloProtect has a state-of-the-art Monitoring Centre which operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year.

The Monitoring Centre is accredited to EN 50518, the European Standard for Alarm Receiving Centres.

The wider SoloProtect solution is also accredited to BS 8484, the British Standard for Lone Working. It’s this standard that allows us to request a priority response for your lone worker from the emergency services.

Take a look at our blog: BS 8484 Lone Worker Standard explained.

Who should use lone worker monitoring systems?

If you have mobile workers or employees who often work alone or remotely, then your organisation would benefit from a lone worker monitoring system.

Examples of users include those who work in the following industries:

You can also use a lone worker monitoring system to protect your homeworkers.

"By deploying a SoloProtect lone worker solution, we’ve ensured a potentially serious situation was resolved without incident."
Project Implementation Manager, John Lewis

Lone Worker Monitoring privacy concerns

It is perfectly legal to track the location of your employees during their working hours for safety and operation reasons.

However, employers should not track the location of colleagues outside of work unless they have the necessary consent. You should also ensure that employees are fully aware of the geolocation functionality contained within SoloProtect devices.

SoloProtect Mobile, our personal safety mobile app, allows the user to turn their location off using the privacy toggle.

Why use SoloProtect to monitor your lone workers?

At SoloProtect, lone worker protection is our passion. We focus hard on delivering the best service and ensuring the quickest possible response to lone workers when they need us most.

In doing so, users of the SoloProtect lone worker system, feel safer, more secure, and happier at work. And, as a result, workers are more productive because they know that SoloProtect will be there to help them at any time of the day or night.

In fact, when a user activates an alert, our Monitoring Centre is listening in only 4.6 seconds, on average. Our operators will then verify the seriousness of the incident and initiate an appropriate response in just over 41 seconds.

More information about lone worker monitoring

Thousands of lone workers are diligently and securely monitored by SoloProtect each day.

To find out more about the benefits of lone worker monitoring to your organisation and the wellbeing of your employees, please contact us or request a demo.

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