The Safety Stakes for New Hire Onboarding
New hire onboarding has long-term consequences—so it’s vital you get it right.
Plenty is at stake for an employee when they arrive at work on the first day of a new job. The psychological effects of employment are profound—researchers have found that people without work are less satisfied, under more mental duress and suffer greater mental health challenges. A new job is a chance for a fresh start, and often, it offers a financial shot in the arm. For a new hire, there’s a lot riding on whether or not things pan out in their new gig.
The stakes are just as high for the employer. When a new hire arrives at the workplace, they fill gaps in the workforce and power up production lines. They are also a cultural wild card and can shake up the organization’s safety culture in dramatically positive or negative ways.
Within all of these variables, there’s one crucial thing a new hire and their employer have in common: serious safety risks put the long-term health of both the worker and the workplace in serious jeopardy.
Risk Potential
The risk for the new hire is straightforward. Roughly a third of all nonfatal workplace injuries happen to workers who have been at their job for under a year. Regardless of age or experience at other jobs, newness to a workplace is a massive contributing factor to injury risk. When someone shows up for their first day, they show up with their lunchbox, a bounce in their step and a sky-high chance of getting hurt sometime in the next twelve months.
The risk for the employer is less obvious but still very real. When an employee is hurt on the job, the employer is hit with the financial impact of worker’s compensation claims and has to deal with the inevitable impact on productivity and morale. And there are several other costs too.
A new employee’s overall levels of satisfaction, productivity and willingness to integrate with company culture are all heavily influenced by how things go in the first weeks on the job. Even if they don’t suffer an injury, a poor experience early in their tenure can sour a new worker’s attitude towards their employer for years to come. Additionally, the Harvard Business Review notes that early turnover rates can be influenced by as much as 50 percent based on how an employee is onboarded—and the HR costs of high turnover can put a major dent in the bottom line.
Importance of Onboarding
The new hire onboarding process can also heavily determine people’s view of safety. And if there’s no onboarding process at all? Well, that speaks volumes about an organization’s priorities and how a new hire is likely to view safety while working there.
The first few weeks at a new job is a relatively short period of time, but it has huge long-term safety implications. Getting those first weeks right can save an organization a lot of money in terms of reduced turnover, fewer injuries and better productivity. It can also cost the organization a lot if they get it wrong.
Many workplaces offer new employees some get-caught-up-on-safety training right off the bat so that they can do their job. However, covering the basics is a lot different than properly teaching workers the ins and outs of workplace safety. Given the high stakes for long-term safety outcomes, EHS professionals need to ensure there’s a quality onboarding process focused on a few key issues. This is to say that if you want to keep new hires safe, you need to show them how safety happens at your workplace and then empower them to take care of themselves.
I watched a webinar the other day with safety consultant Larry Pearlman about how to make the most of a worker’s first ninety days on the job. Pearlman, an expert in new worker safety, advises that one of the most important must-wins in those early months is teaching new hires to look for risk patterns and other human factors issues.
Many hazards are obvious—no one needs to be told to be cautious around the massive trucks as they enter and exit the loading dock. But what may be less clear to new workers is that those trucks are especially dangerous in the afternoon, when the docks are crowded and the drivers are tired and in a rush. Recent hires won’t have the contextual experience to recognize these issues until they’re pointed out to them. They’re also unlikely to have received human factors training, which would have taught them to look out for risk patterns like this or to be aware of the dangers of fatigue, rushing and other states of mind that can elevate the likelihood of an incident.
An Ongoing Effort
It’s also worth noting that before a new hire even has the chance to run into a hazard in the workplace, they will have already encountered the company’s culture. Culture is, at its most basic level, a collective sense of acceptable behaviors and how things should get done. It includes minor stuff, like whether new hires are greeted warmly or with a gruff, “Don’t screw this up like the last guy did.” It also includes major stuff, such as how comfortable workers are with stopping work in unsafe conditions.
People can get a pretty good feel for a workplace’s safety culture if they’re given enough time. After a while, they’ll pick up on whether it’s considered acceptable to file a near-miss report or to exercise stop-work authority. But learning all of that on their own takes time. A proper safety orientation can speed up that learning and reduce the risk of injury—but only if your safety onboarding takes clear steps to integrate new workers into the culture.
Safety onboarding is called a process for a good reason: because it’s ongoing by nature. New hires have a lot to learn in their first months on the job, and they’re liable to forget some of what they learn in their initial onboarding sessions. It’s up to safety professionals to ensure there are established steps to repeat, reinforce and reiterate (and did I mention repeat?) key information.
The first weeks and months on the job are an incredibly risky time for workers and employers. One of the biggest determinants of just how risky they are? The depth of the onboarding process. It takes time and effort for safety professionals to properly train new employees on key safety issues, discuss the human factors that can make their jobs more dangerous, and integrate them into the workplace culture. But when these things happen, new hires have a much better chance of staying safe in the first year on the job.
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.