Most cleaning shifts don’t happen with a colleague nearby. An office at 7am before anyone else arrives, a retail unit after closing, an industrial site overnight, lone working isn’t the exception in commercial cleaning, it’s close to the default. A lone working risk assessment for cleaners needs to reflect that reality properly, not treat it as a rare edge case bolted onto a generic health and safety policy that was really written with an office-based team in mind.
Why the generic risk assessment doesn’t cover this
A standard risk assessment template built around a shared workplace assumes someone’s nearby if something goes wrong, a colleague who notices you haven’t come back from the stockroom, a manager who clocks that you left early. None of that applies to a cleaner working alone in an empty building at 6am. The assessment needs its own version built specifically around the absence of that safety net, not a copy of the office policy with “lone working” added as a single bullet point.
What a real control actually looks like
A written policy that says “lone workers should exercise caution” doesn’t protect anyone. What actually works is a check-in and check-out procedure tied to a specific person or system, and a genuine means of raising an alarm that doesn’t depend on a phone signal being present or a cleaner remembering to use a separate device mid-incident. This overlaps with what a proper cleaning staff app puts in front of a cleaner each shift, since the same app a cleaner already uses to clock in and see their tasks is the natural place for a check-in and alert function to live, rather than a separate tool that gets forgotten.
- 1Define what “lone working” actually covers on each contractAn empty office at 7pm and a large industrial site at 2am carry different risk levels even though both count as lone working. The assessment needs to reflect the actual site, not a generic statement.
- 2Set a real check-in and check-out procedureA cleaner confirming arrival and departure, through an app, a call, or a message to a named contact, is the simplest control that catches most problems: a missed shift, a lock-in, an injury that stops someone finishing on time.
- 3Provide an actual means of raising an alarmA personal phone with no signal in a basement plant room isn’t a lone-worker device. A dedicated panic button or lone-worker app that doesn’t depend on the cleaner remembering to use it under stress is the standard worth aiming for.
- 4Write down what happens when a check-in is missedWho gets alerted, how long before someone acts, and what the escalation looks like if the cleaner still can’t be reached. Without this written down, a missed check-in is just a data point nobody responds to.
Where this connects to insurance and disputes
A missed check-in or an unreported incident doesn’t just create a safety gap, it creates an evidence gap too. If a cleaner is injured or something happens on site with nobody else present, the same proof-of-visit records covered in how proof of work protects both sides of a cleaning contract often end up being the only record of when someone arrived, where they were, and when they left, which matters for both the wellbeing response and any insurance question that follows. Public liability and employer’s liability cover, covered in what a public liability policy actually covers on a cleaning job, also tends to expect a genuine lone-working process rather than assuming one exists.
A lone working policy that only exists on paper doesn’t help anyone at 6am in an empty building. The check-in either happens automatically, or it doesn’t happen at all.