General personal safety tips

If you are a lone worker personal safety is important to you.  Equally, employers must ensure the safety an security of their employees.  You may however; just want some personal safety tips for yourself or that of your family when out and about.  Well, whatever the reasons for you being here, these articles are for you!

A lone worker is someone who ‘works by themselves, or works without close, or direct supervision’.  Obviously, help and support is not generally easily accessible to a lone worker or someone who is isolated.  They are therefore more vulnerable should an accident or incident occur and, at greater risk than others if they find that they do need support.

We should all identify these risks and, find ways to reduce or eliminate them.  Lone workers and their employers have a responsibility to manage lone working safety and security.

So, what advice is available?

Of course we recognise that conflict resolution and conflict management training is the ideal, and very important to lone working safety, security and practice.  Good quality tailored training provides lone workers with the skills, ability and confidence to recognise, avoid and if necessary, manage difficult situations.  However; not everyone is easily able to access training. (If you want to look at training courses, visit our training pages)

So, we are publishing these general personal safety tips for anyone who can’t access training and, for lone workers and employers so that we can all improve our safety and security at work and elsewhere.

We will therefore be looking at general advice in this article – please see the points under ‘general lone working safety points’ below.  Then, we will examine specific points in articles around

• preparation for lone working or going out and about
• Then, working and being in, and around your building
• Also, out and about in the community
• And then, being in open or isolated areas
• And for those who work in customers and service users homes, businesses and other environments, we have some additional lone worker personal safety tips

Browse the articles under the ‘personal safety tips for lone workers and others’ tag for the safety points that apply to your needs.  However; we should firstly all consider:

Personal safety points

• look confident and be alert to surroundings and those around you
• keep credit cards and cash separate.  Ideally in inside pockets and, don’t take all your cards with you
• don’t show valuables unnecessarily (money, phone, jewellery etc.)
• do not get distracted by your mobile phone
• don’t use earphones, by all means put them in your ears to to put people off talking to you but, don’t use them as you won’t hear things around you
• keep house/car keys in an inside pocket and not in your bag/suitcase
• head for a place of safety and call for assistance if you think you are being followed.  Avoid confronting!
• wear suitable clothing
• keep belongings close to you
• when arriving home, have keys ready to use
• let someone know where you are going and what time to expect you back
• carry a charged phone (out of sight) if possible
• don’t accept lifts from people you don’t know, a polite refusal is fine, or have a ready made comment such as ‘No thanks, my friend is coming to meet me’
• if you need to carry proof of age fine, but try not to take too much identifying documentation in case its stolen.  Certainly consider not taking your driving licence as it will have your address on it.

We hope that the information in the articles under the ‘personal safety tips for lone workers and others’ tag are useful to you.  Please take all, or any of this information from these articles and use it to enhance your personal safety and security.  If you want any more information or advice we’d be very pleased to hear from you so, contact us if you wish.