New to the job

“Now Hiring” and “Help Wanted” signs hang in storefront windows and stand in front of numerous businesses around John Newquist’s community.

“There’s a real workers’ market,” said the former OSHA area director, who runs his own training business. “It’s just a nightmare to hire people. You’re either trying to get them right out of high school and train them or you’re trying to advertise heavily.”

It’s a phenomenon that spans the country. As employers struggle to fill open positions, many are turning to inexperienced workers – of all ages.

“When we talk about inexperienced workers, my first thought goes straight to younger employees, but that’s not necessarily the case,” said Bruce Loughner, a technical safety advisor for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. “In today’s world, you can have more mature workers starting a job that they’ve never done before.”

This presents an added challenge for safety professionals: a larger number of workers who aren’t familiar with the risks and hazards related to their role.

Inexperience and injuries

“Inexperienced workers are usually eager to show the employer that they’re valuable,” Loughner said. “So they may want to impress the employer to gain their trust and respect. Sometimes they’ll take more risks to improve their productivity, take a shortcut, or follow some other non-established safety procedure or protocol.”

All of these can raise the risk of injury. Nonfatal injuries among workers with less than three months on the job increased 8.4% in 2020, according to Injury Facts – an online source of preventable death and in-jury statistics compiled by the National Safety Council.

A 2019 case study report of Tennessee construction workers published by CPWR – The Center for Construction Research and Training concluded that, between 2014 and 2015, nearly half of the workers injured were on the job less than 12 months.

OSHA spokesperson Kim Darby recommends that employers, regardless of industry, perform job safety analyses to identify the hazards inexperienced workers may face. “Your OSHA 300 log or workers’ compensation records are a good source of information about the most common hazards in your workplace,” she said.

‘Robust’ onboarding

When workers step into a new role, especially in an industry that’s also new to them, safety needs to be introduced immediately via the onboarding process. That process “needs to be robust, and it just cannot cover the bare minimum,” Loughner said. “It’s important to have a significant onboarding program. That has to go way beyond the safety orientation and the compliance issues.”

Kim Esposito is director of safety and risk management for Exton, PA-based HSC Builders & Construction Managers. During onboarding, she sits down with new hires and a safety manager to talk about the organization’s safety manual, 360-degree safety checks on the jobsite, processes and procedures, and situational awareness.

“Just having that extra talk about it in the beginning helps,” said Esposito, who also serves as an executive committee member for the Mid-Atlantic Construction Safety Council. “When they go out onsite, they take a second thought and say, ‘OK, let me do a 360 and check my area.’”

Time to train

After onboarding comes safety training. OSHA requires employers to provide workers with safety training that covers recognition and avoidance of on-the-job hazards. That training needs to be reinforced.

On construction project sites, HSC conducts mock OSHA inspections. “We start with the opening conference all the way to a closing conference,” Esposito said. “We do a field walkthrough where we look at every nook and cranny of a project.”

Feedback from these mock inspections mostly comes from workers new to the job. “They say, ‘Wow, that was enlightening,’” Esposito said. “It’s been a great tool for us.”

Newquist said that, when training workers in the construction industry, he’s seen employers place inexperienced team members with a seasoned crew after orientation.

“They’re going to take direction from [the crew] and learn the job,” he said. “A lot of companies do daily job briefings, which really helps out. It just reinforces, ‘This is what we’re going to do today. These are the hazards we have to deal with. This is how we’re going to mitigate these hazards. Every day, we’re going to wear hard hats, reflective vests, safety shoes.’ That works out really well.”

In manufacturing environments, demonstrating to inexperienced workers how a piece of machinery works, as well as lockout/tagout procedures, is becoming more common, too, Newquist said. “You’re not just throwing somebody, after five minutes, onto the machine.”

Workers should be encouraged to ask questions. “The No. 1 thing I worry about is they nod their head and say they understand, but they don’t,” Newquist said.

Provide support

Conducting regular follow-ups and providing a mentor/buddy are more ways to help workers better transition to a new job or industry.

A 30-day check-in with a new employee, Newquist said, allows safety pros to review important safety information with workers and invite them to ask questions.

Mentors, meanwhile, don’t always have to be the most senior person on a job, but they can guide an inexperienced worker by sharing the value of safety. “It helps [workers] integrate better into the safety culture,” Loughner said. “It integrates them into the organization faster. Mentorship programs build confidence in employees.

“In a lot of the safety orientation programs, there’s a massive information dump,” he continued. “Employers need to build the systems to support the prevention culture, mentorship, supervision follow-up, apprentice programs, JSAs, accident analysis training. All systems need to be strongly reinforced to ensure new employees have and use the tools and resources to be engaged and productive.”