The post-covid ways of working have brought new risks in terms of lone worker safety, we’ve been told told by Nicole Vazquez, of Worthwhile Training, pictured.
She’s a past speaker at the magazine’s Security TWENTY events, and is running a lone worker safety conference, having run webinars through the pandemic. We had brunch with her last month near her base in Stratford upon Avon. She offers advice and training to train operating companies (whose lone workers include platform staff and conductors on trains), retailers and councils. Nicole began with a local government example of how post-covid ways of managing lone worker risk may need re-visiting.
No back office
Nicole described how a council has typical procedures and tech; a silent alarm that the receptionist can press under their desk. The alert goes to the back office and a trained first responder attends, to defuse a situation. Nicole said: “Now the problem is because of hybrid working, there’s no guarantee of who is going to be in the back office.”
One risk identified by Nicole is simply that fewer people are in offices or business parks; that can leave people feeling vulnerable, and truly being unsafe when going to their cars after work. Or their cars may be broken into. As for retail, anyone who goes in shops can see that fewer staff are around – Nicole only had to point to the poster in the window of our restaurant; it was, like so many, hiring. Fewer staff may mean poorer service than what people expect, and a cause for ‘kicking off’; those fewer staff may feel more at risk, without ‘safety in numbers’.
Pre- and post-pandemic, Worthwhile Training has worked with local government, retailers and train operating companies among others. Visit www.worthwhiletraining.co.uk.
More in the August and September print editions of Professional Security magazine.
About the event
Lone Worker Safety Live, the first since 2019, runs at Lord’s in north London on Tuesday, October 11. The speakers include Jayne Crowe, investigations and security manager at the Co-op; Supt Patrick Holdaway of the National Business Crime Centre; and Barbara Hockey, who heads the Health and Safety Executive’s vulnerable workers unit. Visit www.loneworkersafetylive.com.
