Remote worker safety is the practice of protecting employees who work away from a central workplace, such as at home, in the field or at isolated sites, where help may be far away.
Remote worker safety is the set of policies and practices an employer uses to protect employees who do their jobs away from a central, supervised workplace. Remote workers include people who work from home, field technicians, inspectors, sales staff, utility and energy workers, home care providers, and anyone assigned to an isolated site.
Remote work often overlaps with lone work and mobile work. The common thread is distance: the employer has less direct control over the work environment, supervisors cannot see problems as they happen, and emergency help may take longer to arrive.
Remote worker safety covers physical hazards, such as driving, weather, terrain and workplace violence, as well as ergonomic, electrical and psychosocial hazards for people working from home.
There is no single federal OSHA standard for remote work. The employer's duty to provide a workplace free from recognized serious hazards under the General Duty Clause, along with any applicable OSHA standards, still applies to work done away from the main site.
For home-based work, OSHA Directive CPL 2-0.125, effective February 25, 2000, sets out OSHA's approach:
Several Canadian jurisdictions have specific working alone rules. In British Columbia, for example, the OHS Regulation defines working alone or in isolation as working where assistance would not be readily available in an emergency or if the worker is injured or ill. Section 4.21 requires a written procedure for checking the well-being of such workers, including the time interval between checks, a designated person who makes contact and records the results, and a check at the end of the shift. In Great Britain, HSE guidance on lone working (INDG73) states that employers should provide training, supervision, monitoring and support for lone workers.
Identify who works remotely, where they go, what tasks they do, how long they are out of contact and what could go wrong. Include travel, the people they meet and any medical conditions the worker chooses to share.
Lone worker monitoring with scheduled check-ins and alert escalation can help employers apply these procedures consistently.
Provide suitable vehicles, first aid kits, PPE and communication devices. Train workers on hazard recognition, de-escalation, driving safety, emergency procedures and how to report incidents and near misses from the field.
Offer workstation guidance or self-assessments, provide suitable equipment, and set expectations on breaks and working hours. Make sure workers know how to report work-related injuries that happen at home.
Review the program after incidents, near misses and missed check-ins, and when job duties or locations change.
A water utility sent meter technicians to rural properties alone, often on gravel roads with patchy cell coverage. After a technician rolled his ankle in a ditch and waited over an hour before he could reach anyone, the utility reviewed its procedures.
It set check-in intervals for each route, gave technicians satellite messengers for areas without coverage and named a dispatcher responsible for following up on missed check-ins. Technicians received training on what to do if a check-in was missed and how to call for help. The utility also added end-of-shift check-ins so no one would be left unaccounted for overnight.
For recordkeeping, an injury at home is work-related if it happens while the employee is performing work and is directly related to that work, not to the general home environment. OSHA does not inspect home offices, but employers remain responsible for hazards from equipment or materials they provide.
Not always. A remote worker may work with others at a client site, while a lone worker is by definition without close or direct supervision. Many remote workers are also lone workers for parts of the day.
It depends on the risk. Higher-risk tasks, such as work in isolated areas, around hazardous equipment or with the public, need shorter intervals. In British Columbia, the check-in interval must be set in a written procedure.
The procedure should say who tries to contact the worker, how long they wait, and when they send someone to the worker's last known location or call emergency services.
They should. Isolation, long hours and difficult interactions with the public can cause stress. HSE's lone working guidance addresses stress, mental health and wellbeing for lone workers.
Part of SafetyIQ's EHS glossary: plain-English definitions of workplace health and safety terms.
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