It’s critical that companies get new hires off to a good start in safety. It can not only prevent injuries but also set up a good relationship between employee and employer, and set everyone up for long-term safety success. Here are three crucial and often overlooked contributors to new worker safety.
Safety as a verb
Spotting a hazard is only useful if a worker does something about it. Having the stop-work authority is only valuable if a worker is willing to exercise that right when they feel unsafe. A hazard analysis process is no good if the process isn’t carried out, and it’s no good if the process happens but its insights don’t alter the trajectory of work.
New hires almost always think of safety as a noun—as the condition or state of being safe. They think of it as something that is. Instead, safety professionals should spend the first 90 days teaching them that safety is a verb—it’s something they do, minute to minute, hour to hour, and day to day.
The three biggest impediments to new hires treating safety as a verb are a lack of knowledge, lack of skills and a lack of confidence. This guide has already talked about addressing knowledge gaps via safety onboarding and improving risk awareness. It also covered the concept of human factors where a training partner would provide not only knowledge but also practical skills. The third issue—lack of confidence—can be much trickier.
People call it all sorts of things: psychological safety, employee engagement, social trust, worker empowerment. At its heart, the answer to a single question: do workers feel like they can do the safest thing in any given situation?
There are many reasons why workers might feel like they can’t act safely in the moment:
- There could be pressure from their co-workers to take a safety shortcut.
- They could fear reprisal if they exercise their stop-work authority.
- They could feel embarrassed to ask a clarifying question.
- They could feel amorphous pressures to conform—everyone else on the crew seems fine with a fast pace of work, and no one else is speaking up, so it’s easier to go with the flow than it is to ask if things can go a little slower.
These situations are the most fraught for new hires who are still learning the social codes in their new workplace. Their confidence in their ability to speak up is likely at its lowest, as is their trust in their peers and supervisors.
How safety professionals should deal with this issue deserves a book in and of itself. But suffice to say that safety professionals should make a strong effort to help new hires feel psychologically safe so that they can treat safety as a verb and not just as a noun.
Supervisor support
Over and over, this guide has said that new hires need to have safety knowledge and skills reinforced in a variety of ways. This message is repeated because—well, because repetition is so critical.
A safety manager is much too busy to spend their days shadowing new hires in order to reiterate safety messages. Which makes reinforcing safety a notable issue. In a survey conducted by BLR, roughly two-thirds of respondents said their greatest challenge is gaps in safety skills and reinforcing safety training to fill those gaps.
Safety professionals can’t be there all the time for new hires. But the new hire’s supervisor is in a much better position to provide constant oversight. The only challenge? The supervisor needs to buy into a first 90 days safety onboarding program first.
According to The Safety-First Supervisor, getting supervisor buy-in requires selling supervisors on the value of safety. Show them how safety can make their teams more efficient thanks to fewer lost-time injuries, less waste and equipment damage, and higher-quality work.
Help them connect with the bigger picture—an employee’s first 90 days on the job sets the tone for their entire tenure at the company, and getting it right will make the supervisor’s job much easier for years to come.
And make it as easy for the supervisor as possible. Give frontline leaders resources, talking points, and things to look out for. Explain how they can set up a buddy system so that new hires can learn from more experienced colleagues. Teach them how to positively correct new workers’ safety behaviors. Help them learn how to effectively recognize positive actions. (And don’t forget to recognize supervisors’ good work too—you want to make sure you’re keeping them on-side!) And keep supervisors focused on the need to reinforce a safety culture that prioritizes speaking up, asking questions, and doing the safest thing at all times.
As safety columnist Ray Prest says: “Supervisors play a pivotal role in disseminating—or blocking—your safety message. They are your eyes and ears on the ground, spotting things that might otherwise go unnoticed. And they’re in an ideal position to provide hands-on guidance to workers on safety-related matters. But supervisors can only be your safety coaches if they have the skills and knowledge to do so. After all, you can’t coach someone on something you don’t know about yourself.” So make sure you’ve given them the skills and awareness they need to effectively mentor new hires.
New worker rights and responsibilities
There’s an old workplace safety aphorism that says every rule is written in blood. This means that every regulation, process and procedure exists because someone got hurt doing something, and so a rule was invented to avoid the same thing happening in the future. When we point to the safety rulebook, we’re saying: “Look at all the ways that people have been hurt or killed in the past. We’ve come up with some safer ways of doing things that you should follow, or else.” Regardless of how accurate that framing might be, promoting safety from this negative viewpoint isn’t exactly empowering for your new team members.
But what if you had something more positive you could point to? What if you had a code of rights and responsibilities that framed everyone’s role in workplace safety? The idea here is to create a concise overview of who should do what. To enshrine a worker’s right to safety and their responsibility to play a role in avoiding injury.
Regardless of how you go about it, you need to make it clear that the company is taking many proactive steps to keep workers safe, and in doing so it demonstrates care for workers and improves employee engagement. You also need to make it clear what is expected of workers, helping to dispel ambiguity and encourage new hires to take responsibility for their own safety in the workplace.
Creating new worker rights and responsibilities can be as simple or involved as you’d like, but taking care to craft a thoughtful overview can help act as a handy guide to a new hire safety orientation, and can be a constant point of reference for new workers as they become acclimatized to the workplace.
Any outline of rights and responsibilities should be specific to each workplace and job function. As with any other safety process, you can’t simply give new workers an outline of various rights and responsibilities and then expect them to behave accordingly. It can take time for a new concept to take hold, and it behooves safety folks to hold conversations with workers about what every item means.
The good news? These discussions offer a new avenue to discuss safety processes, hazards, personal responsibility, and other items that affect their safety on a daily basis. It also signals to new hires that safety is a core value, and that new employees can be confident in knowing what is expected of them and what support they will receive in turn.
The next 90 days (and the 90 days after that, and the 90 days after that …)
It’s impossible to overstate how much happens in an employee’s first weeks and months on the job. Their risk of injury is the highest it will likely ever be. Their learning curve on how to perform the job is the steepest. They are trying to adapt in real time to the realities of a new workplace: the environment, the pace of work, the people, the culture.
New hires also spend the first months discovering their new employers’ values. Discovering which hazards might hurt or kill them. Discovering whether the job is a good long-term fit or just a quick entry in their employment history.
Make no mistake about it: during the first year, a new worker is evaluating the company as much as the company is evaluating the worker. New workers will be looking to see whether they’ve been welcomed into a culture of safety and caring. Whether the organization has taken steps to educate and protect them when they’re at their most vulnerable. And whether the organization adapts and learns from their mistakes while consistently prioritizing safety over production.
If the first 90 days of a new hire’s tenure don’t go well, there may not be a next 90 days. The new worker could be seriously hurt or killed on the job. They could decide that the risk of injury isn’t worth it for a company that doesn’t value its employees. Or they could decide that another company down the road is more likely to have a better culture. And if they do stick around, the new hire is unlikely to win any awards for good morale or attitudes towards safety.
This blog post is an excerpt that was adapted from the EHS guide Fitting in Fast: Making a Safe Workplace for New Hires, which reviews the best ways to protect new workers in their first months on the job. Download it for tactics to protect new hires from being hurt in the workplace.
