Section 4:
Lone working risk management and communication
64% of organizations in the UK have had an incident involving a lone worker in the past 3 years, compared to 55% in the US
Unsurprisingly, the above statistic immediately jumped out when writing this report. Coupled with the fact that there has been an increase in the severity of incidents since 2021, it highlights the risks that lone workers face every day.
Incidents of Aggression/Abuse from others have increased from 9% in 2021 to a staggering 17% in 2024!
In light of this information, it's important to understand how organizations perform when it comes to communicating possible risks, and how the nature of these risks has changed since 2021.
This is the longest section of the report, and you will find the results broken down under the following headings, click to jump to each section:
01 - Communication of risk to lone workers
of UK executives say that they communicate the risks of lone working to employees
of UK employees say they receive communications about these risks
As we have seen in Section 2, there was a perception gap between lone workers and executives about the frequency with which risk assessments are performed.
We asked our group of executives how frequently they sent send communications about lone working risks to their employees. For the lone workers, we asked how frequently got these communications.
As you can see from the chart opposite, executives say communication is much more frequent than lone workers. Worryingly, 29% of lone workers say they receive them less frequently or not at all.
When asked what form these communications take, we saw an interesting shift across both groups. Phone and Zoom calls decreased between 2021 and 2024 for both lone workers and executives, while face-to-face meetings and briefings increased.
Email briefings increased for both groups while printed briefings decreased. These results could indicate a willingness in both groups to adopt new and emergent technologies, while traditional paper-based methods are less favorable.
Scroll between the Executives and Lone Workers responses in the charts opposite.
In the US
The vast majority (91%) of US executives said that they communicate the risks faced by lone workers to employees, and how to minimize them. The 2 most popular forms of communicating risk to employees are:
1) Face-to-face briefing
2) Email briefing/ newsletter.
02 - Magnitude of different risks
According to lone workers in the UK, the biggest risk they face is violence and aggression from others
A key goal of this report was to discern the biggest risks lone workers face. We asked our UK lone workers to rank, from highest to lowest, how concerned they were about the following 7 risks:
- Violence /aggression/abuse from others
- Stress / mental health issues
- Working in remote areas with no signal
- Ill health requiring immediate attention
- Environmental risk
- Accidents/trips/falls
- Fatigue
The results showed that lone workers were most concerned about violence and aggression from others (31%), followed closely by stress and mental health issues (28%).
Has there been much of a change in the past few years? Our follow up question to our lone worker group showed that 46% say risks associated with violence/aggression/abuse have increased in the last 2-3 years, with 33% saying stress and mental health-related risks have increased.
How do these results compare to those of the executives?
When our group of UK executives were asked to rank the same risks as above for their lone workers, they ranked working in remote areas with no mobile signal as being of most concern (50%), followed by violence and aggression from others (46%).
Similarly, most US executives ranked ‘Working in remote areas/ places with low signal’ as the issue they were most concerned about.
The group of executives said that all 7 listed risks have increased over the past 2-3 years. The data also shows that executives expect violence/aggression/abuse will be the biggest challenge over the next 3-5 years, with 46% saying it will increase. Environmental risks follow this at 33%.
Reflecting the concern that the executives had about risks associated with lone working in remote areas or those with no signal, we found that just over 60% of executives claim they have some staff who operate in these environments. 70% of these executives are very/quite concerned about it.
In summary, while the order of ranking of possible risks differed between lone workers and executives, both groups believed that all of these risks have increased in recent years.
03 - Management of risk
of UK lone workers say they feel unsafe at least once every few months.
As we have seen, both lone workers and executives believe risks have increased in recent years. But, how are employers responding and managing these risks?
When we asked lone workers how frequently they feel unsafe at work, 29% claimed to feel unsafe at least once a year. This is an increase from 23% in 2021.
One key result we observed in this part of the report is the clear perception gap between lone workers and executives about how concerns are communicated and handled.
Lone workers who said they felt unsafe at work were asked if they had communicated their concerns to managers - 39% said yes. We also asked executives if lone workers expressed their concerns to them regularly – 88% said yes. These are similar results to 2021, indicating that this discrepancy between employees and management warrants further scrutiny.
When asked what extent they felt lone worker concerns were addressed, 14% of lone workers believe their concerns are not addressed at all. No executives said this.
As noted in the opposite graph, the gap between the 2 groups has widened since 2021.
The results have also shown that two-thirds of executives claim to have had at least one incident with a lone worker in the last few years.
We also discovered that while stress and fatigue are still the main issues, aggression and environmental incidents have increased markedly.
Of the executives who had incidents involving lone workers, most classified them as not / very / not at all severe, although the severity of incidents has increased since 2021. Most of the organisations took action to mitigate this with an increase in risk assessments in 2024.
In the US
55% of executives surveyed said they had an incident involving a lone worker in the last 3 years, with slips/trips and falls being the most common kind. The most common response to these incidents was new protective measures.
