Call list, 3am
The control room has two controllers on nights and a list of guards working alone: a construction site, a vacant office block, a car dealership, a warehouse. The procedure says welfare calls every hour. At 3am one controller is dealing with an alarm activation and the other is on the phone to a keyholder. The welfare calls due at 3am go out at 3.25.
The guard at the construction site does not answer. He often does not, because he is on patrol and his phone is in the cabin, or signal is poor behind the site hoarding. The controller tries again at 3.35 and gets through. Everything is fine. But the question every guarding company worries about is the night it is not fine, and the difference between that night and this one is only visible in hindsight.
Why welfare checks slip on busy nights
This is the guarding version of a general lone worker problem, and it has its own features. Controllers juggle welfare calls with alarms, keyholding callouts and patrol alerts, and welfare calls are the ones that can wait a few minutes. Guards on patrol are often away from their phones. A missed call is usually innocent, so it is easy to treat it as innocent every time.
- Welfare calls are made by hand from a list, so busy periods delay them.
- Missed answers are retried informally with no fixed escalation point.
- Calls and outcomes are logged on paper or in a spreadsheet after the fact.
- The control room cannot see if a guard has also stopped scanning patrol checkpoints.
- Guards have no quick way to raise an alarm themselves.
What your welfare procedure should be is for your company, its risk assessments and its advisers. We build the system that runs it.
What the gaps cost
The serious risk is a guard injured or attacked, and nobody noticing for an hour or more. Short of that, delayed or missed checks leave guards feeling unsupported on the loneliest shifts in the job. Clients increasingly ask how you look after guards on their sites. And controllers carry the weight of judgement calls at 3am without a clear rule to follow.
Scheduled welfare checks with escalation
- Each lone guard's shift has a welfare check schedule set by your procedure, for example hourly, loaded from the rota.
- At each check time, the guard's phone prompts them to confirm they are okay with one tap, or a PIN if you want to guard against the phone being answered by someone else.
- If there is no response within the window you set, the phone prompts again with a louder alert.
- If there is still no response, the control room gets an alert with the guard's name, site, last check, last patrol scan and contact numbers.
- The controller calls the guard and, if unanswered, follows your escalation steps: a supervisor, a nearby mobile patrol, the site keyholder, and emergency services where your procedure says so. Each step is shown on screen and recorded with the time.
- The guard can raise an alert at any time with a panic button in the app, or a separate lone worker device if you use one.
- Missed patrols and missed welfare checks for the same guard are combined into one higher-priority alert.
| Stage | What happens | Who is involved |
|---|---|---|
| Check due | Prompt on guard's phone | Guard |
| No response | Second, louder prompt | Guard |
| Still no response | Control room alert | Controller |
| Guard unreachable | Escalation steps from your procedure | Supervisor, mobile unit, keyholder, emergency services as set |
A night shift with automated checks
At 3am every lone guard's phone prompts them. Most tap to confirm within a minute, and the controllers do nothing. The construction site guard does not respond. Two minutes later the control room sees an alert with his last patrol scan at 2.52am near the site cabin. The controller calls, he answers, he had left his phone charging. It is logged. On a different night, when there is still no answer, the escalation steps are right there on the screen.
The morning report shows every check, response time and escalation, which is also what a client asks for when they question how guards on their site are looked after.
Could your welfare checks be missed tonight?
- Welfare calls are made by hand from a list.
- Busy periods push calls late.
- There is no fixed point at which a missed call is escalated.
- Welfare checks and patrol data are on separate screens.
- Guards have no quick way to raise an alarm.