Lone working in universities – health and safety in higher education
The higher education sector is remarkable for its large variety of roles. Jobs.ac.uk puts higher education roles into three broad categories:
Academic – lecturers, research officers, professors, heads of department, etc.
Administration – departmental administrators, events officers, course administrator, librarian etc.
Manual – estates, cleaning staff, catering staff, ground staff, porter, etc.
With such a diversity of roles and responsibilities, universities have many health and safety considerations to keep in mind. Whether a university operates within a dedicated campus or within a town or city, all universities may struggle to supervise and protect their lone working staff and to organise their workforce.
With this in mind, it’s important that your institution has a lone working policy at hand. In this article, we’ll help you understand the risks around lone working, and how you can put together a lone working policy for your institution.
The size of the higher education sector
In 2019/20 there were roughly 2.5 million students and 223,525 academic staff at higher education institutions in the UK.
Although higher education may not seem like a ‘typical’ sector, it is within the UK’s ‘top twenty’ highest-revenue industries. In fact, according to the most up to date figures, The higher education sector has a total income of over £43 billion!
The popularity of universities also has knock-on effects for a range of other sectors. For example, in 2019 there were 650,500 purpose-built student accommodation beds, as well as a million students living in multi-tenancy houses. In this way, the economy of British universities is directly linked to a range of construction, utility, and estate agency roles.
When you include student spending (which includes much more than bar crawls and shop-brand beans), UK universities account for £95 billion of the country’s economy and support more than 940,000 jobs across the nation.
What is lone working, and how does it affect universities?
At least 1/5 of the UK working population are classified as ‘lone workers’. The NHS describes lone working as ‘any situation in which someone works without a colleague nearby or when someone is working out of sight or earshot of another colleague’.
Lone workers in a university may include grounds workers, utility managers, cleaners, technicians or researchers working in empty labs, field researchers, and security personnel.
Lone working can be entirely safe –for instance, those doing admin work from home could be seen as ‘lone workers’ but this has a relatively low risk-factor.
However, in many cases, lone working can be detrimental to physical and mental wellbeing and, as such, is protected by UK health and safety legislation. As a rule of thumb, any risk to wellbeing can be made worse by working alone, due to the lack of immediate support and supervision.
For more general information on lone working, check out our complete guide to lone working.
Statistics on injuries and illness in higher education
Universities actually have a lower than average rate of non-fatal injuries (around 5,000 per year) but several sources have pointed to a higher than average rate of stress, anxiety and depression within the sector.
When taken as a whole, the education sector has one of the highest rates of stress, depression and anxiety, and for higher education specifically, one study showed nearly three-quarters of higher education staff agreed with the statement ‘I find my job stressful’.
As for physical injury, it is worth noting that while higher education has a high rate of admin-based roles (that are generally low in risk), there are many manual jobs that correlate with higher-risk activities.
Some of the most common causes of injury and death across sectors are working at a height, being hit by an object or moving vehicle, and slips trips and falls. Therefore, it is important you pay particular attention to your staff who do manual work as they will be at higher risk (particularly if they work alone).
There is also a higher risk to those who work with the public, so give extra consideration to how that affects security guards, shop and bar staff, and cleaners, for instance.
Lone working policies for universities –what to consider
When creating a lone working policy for a higher education institution, it can be hard to know where to start.
To make creating your lone working policy easier, we have a free lone working policy generator that may help. But, for your educational institution, there may be some specific factors to consider. We will go through them below:
1. Can lone working can be reasonably avoided?
Each team and individual should think about whether a job must be performed alone, or if there is a suitable way of performing the job as a team. If lone working can reasonably be avoided, it should be.
There are some jobs that are never appropriate to do alone and there are some people who may not be capable of lone working (for more information, check out our complete guide to lone working).
2. Has a risk assessment been carried out?
Before undertaking any lone working or high-risk job (such as working late at night), your team should carry out a thorough risk assessment, to help highlight any potential risks and what can be done to mitigate them.
If you need help, we have a free risk assessment generator, here.
3. Who is affected by lone working?
This question should be part of your risk assessment but it’s worth noting that, when working across departments, lone workers need to understand the risks of that area, and how the risk may affect other departments. If a staff member is working in a new area, they should liaise with the managers of that area to make sure it is appropriate for them to work alone.
4. Does the employee have consent to work alone?
Your institution may wish to bring in a lone working consent procedure. In short, this is a way in which those who feel they need to work alone for their job, can request consent from their supervisors or managers. Having this system in place can help improve communication and culpability.
When your team are applying for lone working consent, it’s good to remind them of the previous steps – ‘Do they need to work alone?’, ‘Have they performed a risk assessment?’, etc. before letting them know who they need to contact to get consent.
5. Lone working devices
The UK government states that all employers should provide ‘training, supervision, monitoring and support for lone workers’ including ‘adequate and reliable means of communication and a way to call for help’ and, where necessary, ‘devices designed to raise the alarm in an emergency which can be operated manually or automatically’.
Lone working devices help team members stay safe and protected when they’re working alone or in other high-risk situations.
For example, with Safepoint’s lone working solutions, users can press an emergency alert button on an app or a wearable device, and an alert will be sent to their supervisors and to a team of 24/7 emergency responders, who are always available to provide immediate response. The ‘alert’ allows those watching over the user to see their live GPS location and safety status.
As well as a panic button, Safepoint also protects workers through automatic alerts. For instance, lone workers can create timed ‘tasks’ (such as ‘working late in the lab’ or ‘halls of residence inspection’) and if during that time they fail to check-in as ‘safe’, the app will send out an alert. The wearable devices can even detect if the user has had a fall, and will also raise the alarm.
Beyond alarms, Safepoint creates better supervision and organisation, by allowing supervisors to see all active tasks in a live map –through the Safepoint Portal. The Safepoint Portal makes overseeing a large and varied workforce much easier, especially since users can group lone workers into ‘teams’, such as ‘cleaning staff’, ‘science technicians’, etc.
Once you have decided if a lone working device solution is right for your institution, consider how your staff can apply for a device. Staff should know how to get a lone working device if they need it, and they will need to be trained on how to use it.
Safepoint makes it easy to add and remove new licenses, and even to swap out part-time workers on the same license. Get in touch to find out more.
Lone working in universities – a round-up
Due to the complexity of roles and responsibilities in higher education institutions, creating a lone working policy (or any kind of health and safety strategy) can seem like a daunting task. However, through good communication with your departments and stakeholders, it should be possible to build a process that helps keep lone workers safe.
By building a set of standardised procedures, you are empowering your departments to keep their lone workers safe. Through your lone working policy, workers should be comfortable determining:
Is working alone necessary?
Has a risk assessment been carried out and does is this lone working task safe?
Who is affected by this lone working task, and have they been communicated with?
Do I have consent to work alone? If not, who can I contact to get consent?
Does my institution provide lone working devices, and how do I apply for one?
For more information on lone working policies, please get in touch and our friendly team will be glad to answer any questions you have. If you’d like to learn more about Safepoint’s lone worker solutions, you can always book a meeting!
Keeping university lone workers safe
Safepoint is already protecting workers at great educational institutions such as:
