What is lone working?
Lone working is work carried out without close or direct supervision by others. Much commercial cleaning is lone work by nature, which brings its own duty to assess and manage the risks.
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<img src="https://cleanoptix.co.uk/glossary/lone-working/diagram.svg" alt="lone working — diagram from CleanOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://cleanoptix.co.uk/glossary/lone-working">What is lone working?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://cleanoptix.co.uk">CleanOptix</a>
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</figure>It is the default condition in this industry rather than an exception. Early mornings, late evenings, empty buildings and single-cleaner sites describe most of the sector, and the risks are ordinary ones made worse by nobody being there.
The controls are usually about contact and escalation rather than about the tasks. Knowing who is on site, that they arrived, that they left, and what happens if they do not, is most of what a lone working arrangement consists of.
Some tasks should not be done alone regardless of the arrangements — work at height and certain chemical use among them — and identifying those is part of the assessment rather than a matter of judgement on the night.
In practice
A single cleaner in an office block after six.
She falls off a step stool in a meeting room on the fourth floor. Her phone is in the cupboard with her trolley, two floors down.
Nobody is expecting to hear from her at any point in the shift, so nothing happens when they do not. The building is empty until seven the next morning.
The control is not a number to call. It is somebody noticing silence, and a point at which silence triggers a response.
What goes wrong in practice
- Check-in arrangements that nobody monitors, so a missed call goes unnoticed until the next shift.
- Working at height carried out alone because the building is empty and it is quicker.
- Arrangements written for the contract and never adjusted for a site with poor signal or a difficult location.
- No record of who was on which site, which makes any response slower than it needs to be.