A lone worker is an employee who works out of sight or hearing of colleagues, so that help is not immediately available after an injury or sudden illness, such as a forklift operator alone on a night shift.
OSHA has no general lone worker standard. The employer’s duty to protect people working alone comes mainly from the General Duty Clause and from standards for specific tasks, and emergency procedures belong in the emergency action plan. In forklift operations, lone working is common in cold stores, yards, night shifts, mezzanines and remote storage areas. The risk is not only the incident itself but the delay before anyone notices: an operator pinned after a tip-over or a worker injured in an empty aisle may wait a long time for help.
Controls include scheduled check-ins, buddy systems for high-risk tasks, restricting certain work to staffed hours, and lone worker devices with man-down detection, an SOS button and location. Telematics impact alerts can serve a similar purpose for trucks. The plan should say how an alert is received and who responds. See lone worker safety.