Article Originally Featured in Occupational Health & Safety (OH&S)
Author: Colin Duncan, CEO
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 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.