Lone worker safety requirements, in plain English

There is no single law titled "The Lone Worker Act" in either the US or Canada. Instead, the obligation falls out of the general duty employers have to provide a safe workplace. That makes it easy to assume the rules don’t apply to you — right up until an incident, when they very much do.

United States: the General Duty Clause

OSHA does not have a standalone lone-worker standard, but Section 5(a)(1) of the OSH Act — the "General Duty Clause" — requires employers to provide a workplace "free from recognized hazards". Working alone in a remote or hazardous setting is a recognized hazard. Some specific standards also touch lone work directly, such as the requirements around hydrogen sulfide and confined spaces.

In practice, OSHA expects employers of lone workers to have a means of communication and a system to check on the worker’s welfare at regular intervals.

Canada: OHS regulations and "working alone" provisions

Canada is more explicit. Most provinces have specific "working alone" regulations under their Occupational Health and Safety legislation. Several jurisdictions — including British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan — require employers to assess the risk of working alone and to establish a check-in procedure with a designated person at predetermined intervals.

• A written hazard assessment for work done alone.
• A check-in / communication system appropriate to the risk.
• A documented procedure for what happens when a check-in is missed.
• Records demonstrating the system is actually followed.

The common thread: a documented check-in procedure

Strip away the jurisdictional differences and regulators on both sides of the border want the same three things: you’ve assessed the risk, you have a check-in procedure scaled to that risk, and you can prove it was followed. The third one trips people up — a procedure that lives in someone’s head or a group chat is very hard to evidence after an incident.

Building an auditable trail

This is where an app earns its keep over texts and paper logs. Safir records who checked out, where they went, their expected return, when they actually checked in, and every overdue escalation — automatically. When a regulator, insurer, or incident review asks "show me your lone-worker process and the records for that day", you have a timestamped trail instead of a scramble.