Why Hand Safety Remains One of the Toughest Challenges at Work
From small errors to human factors like complacency and distraction, hand injuries persist across industries. Addressing habits, awareness, and leadership may be the key to protecting workers both on and off the job.
Every so often, the sports calendar gives us a rare phenomenon: baseball, football, basketball and hockey all happening on the same day. Fans call it a “sports equinox,” and it often happens at least once in October, and occasionally in February too, if the Superbowl is played late enough in the year to overlap with pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training. It’s an exciting time for sports fans in part because it’s such a rare occurrence, and it’s one of many demonstrations of just how different each of the major sports are. As you flip from one broadcast to another, announcers can sound like they’re speaking entirely different languages — commenting on the raw strength of a running back, the shot percentage of a point guard and the bat-to-ball skills of a first baseman. There are so few skills that are considered useful across all the major sports, and finding commonalities among them can be as rare as the convergence of their broadcast schedules. But there is one undeniably universal sports asset — a player’s hands.
Quick hands allow a hockey player to deke opponents and a baseball player to turn a double play. Soft hands let a player dribble on the court or throw a touchdown on the field. The same is true outside of sports: a welder’s soft hands improve the quality of their work, and a line worker’s quick hands keep them performing accurately and at pace. As in professional sports, our hands are among the only universal tools spanning across all industries and professions.
Because our hands are used in nearly every single work task, it's no surprise that they are the second most commonly injured body part — and when you include injuries to wrists in your count, they move into first place. All told, nearly one in every hundred people will injure their hands in a given year, either at work or at home. Hardly the type of championship performance one wants to see in such a vital part of the body.
Equally troubling is the long-term consequences of these injuries. One group of researchers discovered that 58.5 percent of hand injuries requiring a trip to the emergency department resulted in “residual functional impairment.” That means hand incidents occur frequently and have a decent chance of causing lifelong damage and disability. And while most people aren’t professional athletes, they still need their hands to earn a paycheque and put food on the table.
Safety is, like sports, sometimes so full of stats and studies that they become white noise. So I will spare you a full summary of Injury Facts and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the swath of researchers who all note the same basic facts: hands are in constant danger of injury and hand safety is hard. Anyone who works with their hands — whether it’s carrying material, operating machinery, or using power tools — is at risk of injury. And simply providing PPE isn’t sufficient, as one survey reported that 83 percent of respondents said hand injuries occurred in their workplace despite workers being given safety gloves.
Hand injuries are so often caused by small errors, such as removing PPE for just a second or momentarily placing a hand in the line of fire. These little mistakes are the result of a number of factors, like complacency, lax habits or a lacklustre safety culture. Getting a grip on these issues requires a handful of approaches, each tailored to your organization’s circumstances, like a glove.
Supervisors should lead the way. In many companies, frontline leaders are in an ideal position to spot complacency, such as PPE being removed when it must be worn. Supervisors can intervene before an error becomes an injury and set positive expectations for safety behavior in the future. Research has shown that if supervisors set a consistent daily climate in the workplace, they can shift the safety culture over time, thereby playing a role in improving long-term safety outcomes, all while handling immediate concerns.
If supervisors approach this with a researcher’s curiosity and a scientific mindset they can ask people questions about why they removed their gloves or had to place their hand in the line of fire, which will not only build trust and foster a positive safety climate but also will help the supervisor diagnose things in the system that are causing people to put their hands at risk. Of course, this isn’t something that supervisors will do spontaneously, and a helping hand goes a long way — safety pros should plan to provide guidance, resources and maybe even training to enable supervisors to get a better grasp on their team’s hand safety
Complacency isn’t the only human factor to influence hand safety. Distraction, fatigue and rushing all contribute to hand incidents. One effective mitigation strategy is to educate workers on human factors and to give them the practical skills to identify and manage them in real time. A good human factors training program can provide context to help improve systems, but it should also include a healthy dose of habit-building. Because the only thing better than workers who think to put on their safety gloves every day is workers who wear them without thinking.
The power of safety habits can reduce all sorts of hand-related incidents, from PPE misuse to placing hands in pinch points to removing safety guards. Notably, it’s also one of the only interventions that keeps people safe where their hands are most at risk: at home.
Yes, there tends to be more hazardous energy at work than in the average person’s house. But there is overwhelming evidence that people are much more likely to suffer an injury at home than at work. Most of us are less mindful of the possibility of injury at home, and certain human factors, like fatigue and distraction, can be even more prevalent there than in the workplace.
Another major factor at home: there are no supervisors looking over your shoulder. No employer provides safety gloves. No safety rules and regulations. There is only an individual’s personal risk tolerance and safety awareness. Building safety habits at work that could carry over to home can make a huge difference in whether your employees end up in the emergency room with a potentially life-altering hand injury. The same goes with personal safety skills that are honed — or left entirely undeveloped — by an employer.
In fact, that’s one of the few other similarities across all workplaces, and across all sports too: being a heads-up player; being aware of what’s going on around you; anticipating a play before it’s made. It can turn a good athlete into a great one. And it helps a player know what to do even when there isn’t a coach whispering a play from the bench.
It does the same for the rest of us too. A decent sense of situational awareness can turn nearly any employee into a hand-safety superstar. It can protect them from the safety shortcuts and human factors that put them at risk both on and off the job. In the end, hand safety is such a stubborn challenge that your ability to solve it in the workplace may depend on the extent to which you build employees’ awareness and habits. And while doing so may take a fair amount of work, it’s also one of the most effective ways to get everyone consistently following the same hand safety playbook.
This article originally appeared in the February/March 2026 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.