Preventing Soft Tissue Injuries: Five DO’s and Don’ts
- By Robert Pater
- Nov 20, 2025
It happened to me several years ago in preparing to present on practical global-class Safety leadership to the senior managers of a Fortune 100 company. Their corporate Vice President of Manufacturing pointedly requested during a pre-seminar interview, “We don’t have time for lots of ‘academic’ theory. Can you just boil it down to a few practical Do’s and Don’ts?” The light flickered on. So, I did.
We’ve been helping companies worldwide across many business sectors prevent the all-too-prevalent soft-tissue injuries and slips/trips/falls for more than three decades. These injuries are likely so pervasive because, in addition to the high number of daily risk exposures, there isn’t any single cause to “target” (despite some who focus mostly on manually moving heavier loads). It turns out that many of these injuries have cumulative trauma contributors, some of which can seem “invisibly” small or inconsequential in themselves (akin to “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”)
In the same spirit as that requested by that VP, here are simple guidelines for leaders to prevent soft-tissue injuries and slips/trips/falls. While these are not the be-all and end-all, getting these basics down can be a great start towards winning this “race.” We know that all of these Do’s and Don’ts work from decades of experience with a wide range of companies and workers.
5 Injury Prevention Don’ts
Don’t:
- Only expect external controls or policies and procedures to be enough to actually move the needle beyond a (low) point. This approach has been well-tried and well-proven to be limited.
- Overly focus on or over-emphasize “Will-power” (as in “Pay more attention,” “Try harder,” “Think Safety,” “Think before you act.”) Rather, transmit needed actual skills (read on) for maintaining control and enhancing self-protection — while more effectively performing tasks.
- Harbor a mechanical view/expectation of people. Be sure to also look for less-obvious psychosocial contributors to these injuries, so you can then redirect them positively. There’s a lot of relatively recent research on how psychosocial contributors (culture, messaging, quality of supervision, uncontrolled stress, and much more) adversely affect these injuries.
- Keep beating a tired/dead horse. If an implementation approach hasn’t delivered results, retire it —at least for now. Look for different methods that are more likely to garner attention and prompt action.
- Only focus on “1” – as in “There’s one right way to move this.” Or interventions that are “1 and done.” Again, cumulative trauma buildup over multiple exposures — at work and at home — is unlikely to be “fixed” by addressing this once in a blue moon.
5 Injury Prevention Do’s:
Do:
- Help change mindsets (beliefs, importance of each person taking greater control of their own Safety) – rather than merely dictating or persuading them to comply with a certain set way. Do more asking, less telling. Help them discover, understand, and buy into. This is especially important with a dispersed or thinly supervised workforce, which can’t be continually monitored. As well as with people who might otherwise build up cumulative trauma from off-work, unseen activities.
- Internalize self-direction/self-leadership/decision-making. Be sure to balance external reinforcement with internal motivation (leaders might ponder, “What’s in it for them, personally, to change their attentional and physical approach to tasks?”)
- Invite them to choose for themselves. Recent neuroscience studies on “choice confirmation” have verified what some change agents have long known: when people decide for themselves, they change their actions more quickly—and this lasts as they become internally self-validating/self-reinforcing. (See Michel Solis’ article in Scientific American, “We Learn Faster When We Aren’t Told What Choices To Make,” which includes this key passage: “When people are afforded the ability to make choices, rather than being told what to do, this led to more effective and lasting learning and change.”) For example, offer two or three methods for safely doing a workplace task, encouraging them to try each and select the one that best fits.
- Transfer real skills that are both mental (e.g. how to practically apply the 3 Laws of Motion, methods of high grading attention control, etc.) with physical (improving balance when on the move or moving objects, safer transfer of forces away from more-vulnerable-to-injury body areas, elevating applied strength through positioning/alignment/bracing, breath control for performance, etc.)
- Aim towards elevating “unconscious competence.” Rather than relying solely on people having to stop and take the time to retrieve and then apply expected methods, change leaders and workers’ mindsets to build the “right” small habits that will be their “safety home base” — even when hurried or stressed. One way to accomplish this is to emphasize at-home applications to build 24/7 habit patterns. And the simpler and smaller the expected change, the more likely people are to incorporate it–and get strong results.
These practical strategies work for a wide array of companies, cultures, age groups, and business sectors. And if they can work for several others, they can work for you. Don’t do the blocking “don’ts” and do the supporting “do’s.”
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.