At most jobs, you’ll be doing your work with or around other people. However, there might be times where you find yourself working alone. In these situations, it’s important to practice good lone worker safety techniques. That way, you can stay safe, even when by yourself…
Lone Worker Safety: Proper Steps
Follow all safety procedures
Lone worker safety is all about minimizing risks. After all, the biggest risk here is not just hurting yourself, but also not having anyone around to help. Therefore, you need to make sure you’re as safe as you can be. This means following all safety procedures, even for those tasks you’ve done plenty of times.
In fact, there’s a lot of high risk activities we do all the time that we rarely think about. For instance, take using a ladder to climb up to someplace high. A fall could result in serious injury, especially in the back. This can become a very serious situation if you’re doing it alone.
Know how to respond
Still, another key part of lone worker safety is knowing how to respond if things go wrong. If you get hurt, you’ll want to do something about it as soon as you can. Trying to “walk it off”, even if it seems minor, could be dangerous and cause the injury to get worse.
As a result, it’s a good idea to be aware of any injury guidelines your work has. These guidelines should cover a wide variety of injury types and scenarios. Plus, they should also detail how you can respond to them, as well as where things like first aid are located at.
Use a check-in/out system
Something which is becoming a common part of lone worker safety is the check-in/out system. What this system does is ensure that someone knows when and where you’re going to be working alone. That way, they’ll know if you don’t show back up on time to go and check in on you.
Also, this system gives you a way to contact for help if you need it. Most systems will make sure that the person leaving has something like a walkie-talkie, or their phone on them. This will let them signal and call for help from others should they end up with an injury.