Who counts as a lone worker?
A lone worker is anyone who works without close or direct supervision, where help would not be immediately at hand if something went wrong. It is not about being the only person on site. Someone alone in a back room of a busy store, or the last person locking up, counts.
Usually a WHS or operations manager scoping a rollout, and finding the list is three times longer than expected.
The test that matters
Forget headcount and ask one question instead: if this person were injured, threatened or became unwell right now, how long before someone noticed and could help? If the honest answer is more than a few minutes, they are working alone for safety purposes, whatever the roster says.
That framing catches the cases a headcount misses, and those cases are where incidents concentrate, because they are the ones nobody planned for.
The people organisations reliably forget
- The first person in and the last person out, even at a fully staffed site
- Anyone in a back office, plant room, storeroom or basement away from the floor
- Community and home-visit workers between appointments, not just during them
- Drivers, once they leave the depot
- Staff working from home, particularly where the work involves conflict or distressing material
- Cleaners, security and maintenance staff working out of hours
- Anyone working on a site with other people who are strangers, such as a contractor on a client site
- Reception and front-of-house staff, who are rarely physically alone but are frequently the only person facing an aggressive visitor
Reception is the one that surprises people. They are surrounded by colleagues and still the most exposed person in the building, because everyone else is behind a door.
Why the definition is worth getting right
Two reasons, and the second is the one that bites. First, you cannot control a risk you have not identified, and a regulator asking about an incident will start with whether the person was identified as working alone. Second, remote or isolated work is a named psychosocial hazard in Australian guidance, so the definition now has a psychological limb as well as a physical one. Someone who feels unsupported and unable to summon help is exposed even if nothing ever happens to them.
How to build the list
- Take a roster and mark every period where fewer than two people are present, including the thirty minutes at either end of the day.
- Add every role that leaves the site during a shift, and treat travel as part of the exposure.
- Walk the building and note every space someone can be in where a shout would not be heard.
- Ask the workers. They know which parts of the job feel isolated, and the answer is often not what management expects.
- Write it down and date it. The list is the first page of your risk assessment and the first thing anyone will ask for.