Page 20 - OHS, April 2022

TRAINING: ELECTRICAL SAFETY
Four Quick Wins
to Improve Safety & Decrease
Employee Turnover
40 percent of workers who are injured have been on the job less than a year.
BY COLIN DUNCAN
Companies around the world are doubling their cultural efforts in a unique and challenging labor market. This is especially the
case when it comes to placing a heightened emphasis on safer working conditions and practices. What’s driving this shift? Employee turnover and attrition.
The Great Resignation has left a void in many organizational charts, opening the door for potential injury risks and safety hazards. As companies continue to ramp up their recruitment efforts, they are likely to attract candidates from different industries. Additionally, boomerang employees who left during the onset of the pandemic may now be re-entering the workforce without recent experience or training. These factors are safety red flags.
We tend to see that employees are more likely to get injured in their first year of employment, and in their final years of work. This directly correlates to the traditional ‘bathtub curve’ used to describe the typical equipment failure rate against time. There is a slight dip and flattening of injury risk in the middle part of a worker’s career before it scales back up as they near retirement.
Statistics from Occupational Health and Safety (OSHA) bear this out. OSHA statistics report that 40 percent of workers who are injured have been on the job less than a year.1 On the other side of the
curve, older workers were more likely to be fatally injured on the job.
So, Who’s Quitting?
A 2021 study by the Harvard Business Review found that resignation rates were highest among mid-career employees. Employees between 30 and 45 years old had the greatest increase in resignation rates, with an average increase of more than 20 percent between 2020 and 2021, according to the report.2 Which means that our safest workers are the workers we are most likely to lose! Think back to our failure curve commentary before. This trend of mid-career workers leaving the workforce is likely to have lasting impacts on safety performance if action isn’t taken.
These workers traditionally represent the lowest volume of injuries on our payroll due to the institutional and task specific knowledge they have accrued over time.
In working with over 1,000 companies globally and managing the safety, reliability, and maintenance of more than two million energized assets per year, we have helped many organizations shift the way they govern safety in the workplace.
We have also acquired a deep understanding of the practices most likely to garner success. Here are a four “quick wins” we have found pivotal in the short- term, while a long-term strategy for safety excellence is built.
Ariya J/Shutterstock.com
Quick Win: Safety Should Be Integrated, Not Isolated
Too often safety is a disparate function, separated from everyday operational functions. Internal safety organizations have often been considered speed bumps to progress on major projects involving inherent risk.
The challenges of the current labor market necessarily require that we push safety to the fore. All recruiting, onboarding, coaching, and on-the-job training should anchor in understanding the organization’s safety goals, programs, expectations, and available resources.
Enhanced education on hazard awareness and risk communications is especially beneficial for employees in that critical first year of work. What do we know about new employees? They are eager to impress, and they are less likely to communicate safety concerns than more established professionals.
We must take control of our risk communications approach to prevent this problem from becoming the norm.
Quick Win: Introduce
Psychological Safety
With the Great Resignation will come a Great Return of employees. Regardless of the work environment, but especially in high-risk environments, figuring out how to manage workers’ safety has become one
16 Occupational Health & Safety | APRIL 2022
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