How Automated Safety is Benefitting Lone Worker Compliance and Efficiency

Lone working is a daily reality for millions of employees across the UK. While not inherently dangerous, lone working can act as a risk multiplier, increasing the severity of potential accidents, health emergencies and threats. For employers, this creates a clear duty of care and a legal responsibility to follow HSE guidance, including conducting robust risk assessments, implementing control measures and keeping in touch with employees.

Meeting these obligations is essential, but managing them manually can be time-consuming and prone to human error. Too often, the processes designed to protect staff become a source of friction, with employees struggling to keep up with extra systems while carrying out their day-to-day duties.

At Peoplesafe, we believe safety should be seamless, not a second job. That’s why the Peoplesafe App is designed specifically to address this challenge. Built with automation in mind, it enables routine safety tasks, such as check-ins, activity logging, and alarm escalation, to become seamless, automated actions that can be triggered by events happening outside of the app.

This approach ensures that safety protocols are followed consistently, auditable records are generated automatically, and employees can focus on their work without the distraction of administrative tasks.

Efficiency Meets Compliance Through Automation

We believe that true efficiency in safety comes from eliminating manual steps, which can be achieved through two approaches: system-level and user-level.

Automating Workforce Safety with APIs

System-level automation, enabled through APIs, integrates directly with workforce management or scheduling software. This approach allows organisations to guarantee compliance across entire teams, ensuring that safety procedures are triggered according to schedules, locations, or risk categories.

Peoplesafe’s APIs take automation a step further, allowing organisations to integrate their existing HR and workforce management platforms directly with our Nexus online management portal. Through these connections, user onboarding, safety actions tied to employee shifts, and activity logging can all be automated, reducing manual workload and ensuring records are always accurate and up to date.

Personalised Safety Workflows with iOS Automations

For individual workers, user-level automation leverages features such as iOS Shortcuts and automations to provide personalised safety workflows. These automations allow every user to build powerful workflows based on time, location, or physical action, when system integration is not present.

1. Automated Shift Coverage: From Door to Door
   A common compliance requirement is covering a worker’s shift from the moment they leave home until they return safely. Through geofenced automations, a worker can trigger a ‘Check In’ shortcut as they leave their home address and a ‘Check Out’ upon return. This creates a full, auditable record of the working day with zero administrative effort.
2. Activity Logging That Adapts to the Job
   Workers moving between high-risk and low-risk environments often need to log their activity constantly. Automation can trigger the ‘Start Timed Activity’ shortcut whenever a worker arrives at a specific site, ensuring that the high-risk activity timer starts immediately upon arrival, without any manual input.
3. Intuitive Safety: The Discreet Alarm
   In emergencies where discretion is critical, automated shortcuts allow users to trigger a full alarm quickly via gestures or hardware controls on iPhone and Apple Watch. Examples include a triple back tap, lock screen shortcuts, dedicated action buttons, or single-tap complications on the watch. This integration ensures fast, silent, and reliable escalation.

Enhancing Risk Management Through Automation

Through automation at both system and user level, Peoplesafe is transforming how organisations protect lone workers, making safety seamless, reliable, auditable, and fully compliant. Our commitment to continuous innovation ensures that as work evolves, so too does the technology keeping employees safe, allowing teams to focus on their roles with complete confidence and peace of mind.