Four Quick Wins to Improve Safety & Decrease Employee Turnover
Forty percent of workers who are injured have been on the job less than a year.
- By Colin Duncan
- Apr 01, 2022
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. 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. Which means that our safest workers are the workers we are most likely to lose! Think back to our failure curve commentary above. 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.
This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.