1st June 2026
For years, employers have worried about the wellbeing of people who work alone: salespeople on the road, care workers moving between visits, engineers out on site. But what was once treated as a niche challenge now reaches much further across the workforce. More jobs now sit outside the rhythms of a shared workplace, which means more employees spend much of their time physically apart from the people most likely to notice when something is wrong.
Mental health support is easiest to provide when people are visible. Managers can spot changes in mood or energy and colleagues can pick up on strain before it becomes a crisis. Once work becomes more mobile, solitary or fragmented, those informal safeguards weaken. A Health and Safety Executive report points out that if contact is poor, lone workers may feel “disconnected, isolated or abandoned”, affecting performance and mental health. It also says employers should have direct contact procedures in place so managers can recognise signs of stress early.
A worker moving from meeting to meeting, driving between sites or spending most of the day alone may look fine from a distance simply because the work is getting done. But less visibility means fewer chances to notice when strain is building. Problems can remain hidden until they are harder to address.
The wider workplace evidence suggests that connection is key. The CIPD’s Good Work Index 2025 says employee care, community and good relationships with managers and colleagues “cannot be overstated”. It also finds that loneliness at work is among the factors most strongly associated with lower reported performance and a higher likelihood of quitting. In other words, feeling supported is closely tied to whether people stay well, stay engaged and stay in the job.
For employees outside the office, those protective factors are often weaker by design and British Red Cross research shows the problem is not limited to severe loneliness. Around one in ten workers often or always experiences aspects of loneliness at work, while nearly half say they feel lonely at work at least some of the time. That points to a broader and more everyday problem: not simply acute isolation, but the slower erosion of contact, belonging and support.
Some of the clearest practical evidence comes from sectors where lone working is routine. Research by Skills for Care into adult social care found that three quarters of managers surveyed believed mental health and wellbeing issues were more likely among lone workers than among non-lone workers. Two thirds said stress among lone workers was a challenge, and more than half of those respondents said working alone was a major contributory factor.
Dominic Bennett, CEO of On Wellbeing, says that many employers still underestimate how easily mobile or field-based workers can slip beyond the reach of normal support. “People who are always moving can appear to be coping simply because they keep turning up and getting through the day,” he says. “But if someone is rarely around colleagues or managers, there are fewer natural opportunities to notice when something is changing. That makes early support much harder.”
Employers need to design support around how people actually work. HSE guidance points to some of the basics: regular contact, clear check-in procedures and practical ways for managers to spot signs of stress early. The broader lesson is that workers outside the office cannot be left to rely on visibility they simply do not have. If support depends on being seen, the people most at risk of falling through the gaps may be the ones organisations see least.
Bennett believes that the strongest employers understand this is a management issue as much as a wellbeing one. “Good organisations don’t make support available only to the people they see most often,” Bennett says. “For field-based and lone workers, support must travel with them. App-based wellbeing tools can play an important role because they give people a way to access help in the moment, wherever they are working.”
As more work moves beyond the office, more employers will have to confront a simple fact: support designed for visible workers will not reliably reach people who are easy to miss. As Bennett says: “The workers who are easiest to miss should not be the hardest to support.”
