Lone Working: How to Meet the Danish Workplace Authority Requirements
A practical guide for employers – legal requirements, risk assessment and a concrete checklist.
Thousands of employees work alone every day – on night shifts, at customer sites, in warehouses, on production floors or in care facilities. As an employer you have a legal duty to ensure they can always call for help.
This is a practical guide to what the Danish Workplace Authority requires – and how you document it.
What counts as lone working?
Lone working covers situations where an employee carries out their work without immediate visual or audible contact with colleagues or a manager. This could be a home-care worker visiting a citizen, a warehouse employee on a night shift, a retail employee during closing or a technician servicing a machine alone on a production floor.
Not all lone working has the same risk profile. An office worker alone on a Sunday afternoon faces a very different risk from someone working alone with heavy machinery or visiting citizens with a history of conflict. The law distinguishes – and so should your risk assessment.
What does the law require?
Section 15 of the Danish Working Environment Act obliges the employer to ensure that work can be carried out "in a fully safe and healthy manner". For lone working, the requirements are spelled out in the Danish Workplace Authority guidance D.2.25 – and they boil down to three concrete points:[1][2]
- Risk assessment in the APV: All forms of lone working must be mapped and assessed as part of the workplace assessment.
- Access to help: The employee must always be able to summon fast and effective help in case of accident, illness, violence or threat.
- Documentation: The risk assessment, the chosen solution and the employee instruction must be available to show during an inspection.
When is an alarm enough?
Guidance D.2.25 accepts that an alarm can meet the requirement for fast help – but only if three preconditions are in place. The alarm must always be activatable, even if the employee is injured or facing a threatening person. It must reach a recipient who can actually respond. And help must arrive quickly enough to make a difference.
If any of the three preconditions is uncertain, the Workplace Authority typically requires visual or audible contact – that is, a colleague within sight or shouting distance. That is why a mobile phone in a pocket is rarely enough: it may be away from the body, out of coverage or on silent precisely when it matters.
A dedicated safety button worn on the body and triggered with one press – without needing to look at it – typically meets all three preconditions at once. See Linucare’s personnel safety solution.
See also: How Grundfos uses Linucare on the production floor.
Checklist: 6 questions for your workplace assessment
- 1. Identified: Are all situations of lone working – including outside normal hours – mapped?
- 2. Assessed: Are risks (violence, accidents, sudden illness) described concretely per role?
- 3. Activation: Can the employee trigger an alarm with one hand, silently, and without having to search for a device?
- 4. Reception: Is there always a recipient available who can react – including nights and weekends?
- 5. Response time: Can help actually arrive within a timeframe where it makes a difference?
- 6. Documentation: Are activations logged, and can you show instructions, tests and logs during an inspection?
[1] Danish Working Environment Act, Retsinformation, retsinformation.dk
[2] Danish Working Environment Authority, Guidance D.2.25 on lone working, at.dk
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