Lone worker monitoring for guards
without paying for a second system
Most guarding hours are lone worker hours. The single officer on a night post, the roving vehicle unit, the supervisor driving between sites at four in the morning — none of them has a colleague within sight or earshot. The usual answer is to bolt a specialist duress product onto the roster you already run, which leaves the officer carrying two apps and your operations desk watching two screens. CGuardPro puts the duress channel in the same app the officer already clocks in, reads orders and files reports from, so the alarm arrives at a desk that already knows which post the officer is standing and who else is on that site.
Real product screenshots
Why the bolt-on approach quietly fails
Two subscriptions and one pocket
The duress platform bills per user and so does the workforce platform, for the same officer, on the same phone. Officers stop opening the second app within a month of rollout, and an app nobody opens is not a safety measure — it is a line item.
An alarm with no roster behind it
A standalone duress tool can tell you that someone triggered an alert and roughly where they were. It cannot tell you which post they were scheduled to, which other officers are on that property tonight, or who the relief is. Your own desk has all three, which is why the alarm belongs there.
The button only works if there is a hand on it
Duress buttons cover the emergencies the officer sees coming. They do nothing for the officer who is unconscious, or who never made it to the post at all. Those cases are caught by things the officer does not have to do: a round that never got walked, a post with nobody clocked in.
How the lone worker cover actually works
SOS from the app they already use
One press raises an audible alarm on your operations board with the officer's identity, their assigned post and the device location at the moment of activation. Who receives it is a setting, not something buried in our code: you choose the roles, add extra addresses, and set how the alert escalates and repeats if nobody picks it up.
A case that will not go quiet on its own
The alert opens a top-priority case with distinct states — acknowledged, dispatched, resolved, closed — each with its own timestamp. That is what turns a scare into a response time you can put in front of a client.
The round that never finishes raises its own flag
Patrol cadence is configured per site: how often a round should happen, how many per shift, how much lateness you tolerate, and how long a round may take. If a round starts and does not finish inside its maximum duration plus grace, or if no round starts within its interval plus grace, your desk is told. The officer does nothing to trigger it.
An empty post is visible, not discovered at dawn
A no-call-no-show, an officer pulled elsewhere or a post left uncovered is recorded as a coverage deviation with its reason, so the gap is a state in the system rather than a rumour. Filling it can go out as a WhatsApp offer to the officers who could take it, with an expiry — the first to accept takes the shift.
What a lone officer gets, and what your desk gets
- One app for the officer: schedule, clock-in, post orders, rounds, reports and duress
- Escalation and repetition of a panic alert configured against your own roles, not fixed in code
- Identity, assigned post and device position attached to every activation
- Late and missed rounds derived from your own cadence settings, per site
- Uncovered posts recorded with a reason, and shift offers that go to phones rather than a phone tree
- Acknowledge, dispatch and resolve times on every case, exportable for a client review
- No second per-user subscription and no second dashboard for your operators to watch
Frequently asked questions
Does CGuardPro detect a fall or a man down automatically? +
No, and we would rather say that here than have you find out during an incident. There is no accelerometer-based fall detection, no no-motion timer and no countdown check-in that locks the phone until the officer taps it. What exists is deliberate activation by the officer, plus passive signals that do not depend on the officer acting at all: a round that started and never completed, a round that never started inside its window, and a post with nobody clocked in. If a contract obliges you to provide certified fall detection, a dedicated device is the honest answer and you should buy one.
Who counts as a lone worker in a guarding company? +
Anyone standing a post with no colleague in sight or earshot. In practice that is a much larger share of the schedule than most operators assume: single-officer night shifts, unstaffed gates, roving vehicle patrols, mobile alarm response, and supervisors driving a route of site visits alone. If you count the hours, the lone worker exposure is usually the majority of the payroll rather than a special case.
Where does an alert go, and what if nobody answers? +
Recipients are configured as roles plus any extra addresses you add, which matters if your monitoring desk uses a role name of your own rather than a standard one. The alert escalates and repeats on the schedule you set, and the case stays at top priority until a person acknowledges it. It is a queue with mandatory states, not a notification that can be swiped away.
What happens if the officer has no signal when they need help? +
An SOS needs a live connection to reach your desk — treat a basement or a dead spot as a place where the duress channel does not reach, and plan the post accordingly. Separately, the app does hold work offline: incidents, visitor entries and the start and finish of a tour are queued on the phone and sent when the connection returns, and an incident keeps the time it actually happened rather than the time it uploaded. Clocking in is not queued and needs a connection.
Do we still need a dedicated lone worker product alongside this? +
It depends on what you are buying it for. If the requirement is a duress channel that reaches your own operations desk with roster context attached, this replaces it. If the requirement is a monitored receiving centre staffed by a third party overnight, or certified automatic fall detection on a body-worn device, this does not replace it and no scheduling platform will.
Can a supervisor working alone between sites use the same cover? +
Yes. Supervisors run site visits as a route with points, and the visits queue offline like an officer's incidents do. The same duress channel is in their app, and a route that stalls between two points is visible on the board as an unfinished run rather than something noticed at the end of the shift.
Does the officer have to check in every thirty minutes? +
No. There is no timer that nags the officer for a proof of life, because in practice those get dismissed reflexively and stop meaning anything. The patrol round is the check-in: it is work the officer has to do anyway, it produces evidence for the client, and its absence is what raises the flag.
How is this different from the panic button page? +
The panic button page describes the duress protocol itself — what fires, who is notified and how the case closes. This page is about the wider exposure of an officer working alone, where duress is one of four mechanisms alongside missed rounds, uncovered posts and live position. Read them together if you are writing a lone worker policy.
Put the duress channel where the officer already is
Book a demo and bring one real lone post. We will configure its patrol cadence, set who receives its alarms, and then let a round go deliberately unfinished so you can watch what your desk sees.