No matter how much experience a new worker has at other companies, changing employers requires a new hire to figure out how to navigate new tasks, new hazards and a new culture. They also need to develop a feeling of comfort in refusing unsafe work, speaking up about safety issues, and they must also learn how they should share their concerns.
With such a steep learning curve, it’s no wonder why new workers are injured at such high rates.
Reducing the risk of injury requires safety professionals to speed up the learning process that all new hires go through. It requires a proper safety orientation, establishing a sense of trust and psychological safety, and it requires support and monitoring.
In short: it requires getting the first 90 days right.
Safety consultant Larry Pearlman is an expert in new worker safety, and he says that an employee’s first 90 days on the job are crucial:
“There are a few big things that companies need to get right during a worker’s first three months on the job. They need to set safety expectations, they need to train people to get them up to speed, and they need to demonstrate a certain level of care for the new employee. That requires doing all sorts of little things right to improve risk awareness, build trust, and reinforce safe behaviors. However a worker’s first ninety days go, either well or poorly, it will set the stage for the future attitudes towards safety and their relationship with their employer.”
Here are some of the foundational components of a successful and safe first 90 days on the job:
Safety onboarding
New employees should be given the same safety training that everyone else has already received. It’s a basic concept that all too often is not put into practice.
According to research conducted by the Institute for Work & Health, only one out of five new workers remember receiving safety training. In some cases, employees simply don’t receive safety training in a timely manner. A subset of these cases is when employers hold back on delivering expensive or time-consuming training until after the probationary period and after they see whether the person is going to “work out” and stay long-term. (This is a particularly ineffective tactic, as by the time employees are deemed worthy of safety training, they will have already received the message loud and clear: financial considerations are more important than safety, and it may be time to look for another job that cares as much for people as production.)
In other cases, new hires receive training but it isn’t delivered effectively, to the extent that workers simply forget what is taught to them. In both cases, the effect is the same—inexperienced employees navigating an unfamiliar workplace without the benefit of safety training.
Just how effective is safety onboarding? Scott Schneider, director of occupational safety and health at the Washington-based Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America, points out that on union sites “people have a substantial amount of safety training in apprenticeship programs” which results in fewer safety problems and better communication. This package of training and mentorship goes a long way toward mitigating the risks associated with being a new worker.
All told, the quality of safety onboarding has a direct impact on injury outcomes. A robust safety onboarding process should include:
- An overview of safety processes, procedures and equipment
- A review of site-specific risks and mitigation strategies
- An introduction to the company’s safety culture
- A discussion of the right to refuse unsafe work and the stop-work authority process
- The correct process for reporting injuries, near-misses and emergencies
- Risk assessments and other pre-job evaluations
- Any additional safety training that existing workers have received
As the statistics from the Institute for Work & Health demonstrate, it’s not enough to teach people these things once. You have to teach them, reinforce what they learned, give them opportunities to practice, and then monitor and correct them in the workplace as they deploy what they’ve learned. Otherwise, you’ll risk being one of the 80% of workplaces where new hires don’t recall their initial safety training.
Risk awareness
Almost every hazard is conditional. Come into contact with a power line and it’ll zap you every time—unless the electricity has been shut off. Knowing when, where, and why something is dangerous is one of the core features of workplace safety. And a big part of hiring new employees is improving their risk awareness and situational safety skills.
In some cases, this is a matter of educating them on standard safety processes. New hires can learn to recognize the risk of working on a large piece of equipment, for example, based on whether it’s been locked and tagged out.
They can also be taught about site-specific hazards such as an area of a construction site where truck drivers tend to drive faster than they should, or where visual obstructions or distractions might reduce a driver’s ability to notice someone on foot.
These are examples of on/off types of risk: The risk is higher over here and lower over there. The risk is absent when there’s a tag on the equipment and the risk is present when there isn’t a tag. Hazards like these abound in the workplace, and it’s important to familiarize new hires with them. Because, as noted earlier in this guide, many people have a hard time noticing even obviously fatal hazards on their own.
What’s even trickier is a risk that fluctuates in real time. A walkway might become a little slippery as it rains and then increasingly so as the weather worsens. Or a worker may become more tired—and clumsy and forgetful as a result—towards the end of the shift or the end of the week. These types of risks occur on a sliding scale, and new workers can find it challenging to stay aware of sources of risk that are constantly changing.
Human factors are the most notable form of fluctuating risk, alongside shifts in the working environment due to the weather or the nature of the work (such as a walkway filling with trip hazards over the course of the day). Educating workers about fatigue, rushing, distraction and other human factors can be tricky, especially if this is the first time that new hires have ever thought about risk in this way.
It’s often best to rely on a third party to train them on this sort of thing, given the sizeable list of education required for new hires. But whether you’re doing it yourself or relying on a vendor, make sure that you’re including risk fluctuations as part of your risk awareness training.
Don’t forget about the need to provide reminders about these hazards. No one shows up to work trying to get injured, but no one has a perfect memory either. Learning takes time and support, especially if new hires used to work at companies that didn’t value risk awareness skills.
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.
