The Five Things That Cost Nothing

Almost every organisation reaching for a lone worker solution reaches for a purchase. Five arrangements deliver most of the protection and none of them requires one.

When the five things that cost nothing also depends on reliable work records, open the guide can support time, attendance and workload review without being treated as the emergency response itself. Compare any workflow with HSE lone-working guidance and keep alarm ownership, escalation and dispatch responsibilities explicit.

One: the risk assessment

A written assessment, by situation rather than by job title, dated and reviewed.

It determines whether equipment is the right control, which tasks should not be done alone, and where the exposure actually is.

Its absence is the finding in most enforcement action in this area — not the absence of devices.

Cost: an afternoon with the people who do the work.

Return: it is the document everything else is built on and the first thing an inspector asks for.

Two: the escalation tree, tested

Names, numbers, hours, timings, authority — and a test at the hour the work happens.

Because every device in the world ends at this chain, and a chain with a wrong number in it ends nowhere.

The first test almost always finds something: a number that rings out, a responder who did not know they were on the list, nobody at all after midnight.

Cost: one afternoon a quarter.

Return: the largest single improvement available in this subject, and it is free.

Three: the check-in arrangement

Somebody says they are all right at agreed intervals, and somebody acts if they do not.

A phone and a named person is a complete implementation.

The interval comes from the hazard, and the response to a miss is an action rather than a judgement — which is the part that makes it a control rather than a record.

Cost: the receiver's attention.

Return: it covers the case no device covers, which is the worker who cannot press anything.

Four: the withdrawal permission

"You may leave any situation you judge unsafe. You do not need permission, and there will be no consequence."

Stated by somebody senior, without qualifiers, and demonstrated the first time it happens.

It is the most effective control against interpersonal risk that exists, and it is the one most often written with a caveat that removes it.

Cost: the occasional visit.

Return: the incidents that did not happen, which nobody will ever count and which are the point.

Five: telling people what the arrangement is

Who is watching, at what hours, what happens after the button, and what the device does and does not do.

A worker who does not know whether anybody is at the other end will not rely on the system, and will not report the near miss either.

Cost: forty minutes at induction and ten minutes a year.

Return: the difference between equipment carried and equipment used.

Why these get skipped

None of them produces an artefact that can be shown to a board.

None arrives in a box.

None has a supplier advocating for it.

And each requires a decision rather than a purchase, which is slower and harder and is precisely the reason the substitution described throughout this collection keeps happening.

Doing all five

A quarter, if somebody owns it.

Assessment in weeks one to four. Tree built and tested in five to eight. Check-ins running by week nine. The withdrawal statement made at the start and demonstrated when the occasion arises. The briefing delivered as each part lands.

At the end of that quarter an organisation has a functioning arrangement and has spent nothing, and it is in a position to decide what equipment would add — which is a much better question than the one it started with.

What equipment adds to these five

Speed, in the cases where minutes matter.

A location for whoever responds.

A way to summon help discreetly, which the check-in cannot provide.

And detection for the worker who cannot act at all.

Four real additions, and they are additions to an arrangement rather than a replacement for one.

The order matters

Assessment first, because it determines everything else.

Tree second, because it is free and immediately informative.

Check-ins third, because they protect people while procurement takes its months.

The withdrawal statement at any point, and the sooner the better.

And the briefing as each part lands, rather than as a single event at the end.

Reversed — devices first and the assessment written to justify them — produces the arrangement this collection keeps describing, where everything exists and nothing has been tested.