Section 4:
Lone working risk management and communication
64% of organisations have had an incident involving a lone worker in the past 3 years.
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 organisations 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:
i) Communication of risk to lone workers
of executives say that they communicate the risks of lone working to employees
of 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 favourable.
Scroll between the Executives and Lone Workers responses in the charts opposite.
ii) Magnitude of different risks
According to lone workers, 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 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 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%).
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.
iii) Management of risk
of 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.