Blog · 2026-07-23 · By the Duress team
What seven seconds actually buys
A 7-second median operator pickup sounds like a marketing number. Here's what the distribution behind it looks like, and why the tail matters more than the median.
Every monitored-safety vendor has a response-time number. Ours is seven seconds. The number is easy to say and hard to verify, which is exactly why the distribution behind it matters more than the headline.
The shape, not just the middle
In the FY26 State of Lone Worker Safety report, the median time from an alarm being raised to a monitoring operator opening the case was 7 seconds. But a median hides the story a safety buyer actually needs, which is the worst case, not the typical one. Here is the full distribution:
- 0 to 5 seconds: 13.5% of activations
- 5 to 10 seconds: 52.8% — the bulk
- 10 to 15 seconds: 16.7%
- 15 to 20 seconds: 5.8%
- 20 to 30 seconds: 5.2%
- 30 to 60 seconds: 5.9%
Put another way: 71.6% of alarms were answered inside 10 seconds, 94.2% inside 30, and 99% inside 52. The tail is short. When something goes wrong at the response layer - a spike in volume, a systems hiccup - it shows up in that tail, and in FY26 the tail stayed thin.
Why the median is the wrong number to promise
A median says nothing about the alarms that take longest, and those are the ones that keep a WHS manager up at night. A vendor can advertise a fast median while quietly letting a meaningful share of alarms drift to a minute or more. The honest number is the percentile: what share is answered inside 10 seconds, inside 30, inside a minute.
So when you evaluate any monitored system, ask for the distribution, not the average. “Our median is X” invites the follow-up “and your 95th percentile?” If a vendor cannot answer, the median is decoration.
Seconds are the product
The reason to obsess over the tail is that the response time does not vary by when the risk is highest. The median pickup does not slow down after hours, on weekends, or on public holidays - the after-hours data shows those are exactly the windows when an alarm is most likely to be a real emergency. A response system that got slower at 2am would be fast precisely when it does not matter.
That is what seven seconds buys: not a marketing line, but a consistent floor under the worst moments of a worker’s day. The full distribution, methodology and year-on-year trend are published, free to cite with attribution.