No one is ever completely free of injury risk in the workplace. But some workers are at a greater risk of harm than others. More than any other group of employees, new workers—that is, people who have been at their current workplace for less than a year—have an outsized chance of being injured.

A new guide on the subject collects recent research on new worker safety and presents a compelling case for the dangers to recent hires. According to Fitting In Fast: Making a Safe Workspace for New Hires, new workers and young workers are both at major risk of being hurt or killed on the job:

• The insurance company Travelers found that 35% of injuries happened to workers who were in their first year on the job, resulting in over 6 million lost workdays.
• British Columbia’s Occupational Health and Safety Regulation found that 50% of young workers were hurt in their first six months on the job.
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that over a third of nonfatal workplace injuries happen to workers who have been with their employer for less than 12 months.
• Every nine minutes, a teenager visits the emergency room due to a workplace injury.

No matter where you look, the story is the same: new workers and young workers face a significant chance of being hurt at their place of employment. But as the guide points out, not all new workers are the same. In fact, there are many notable differences from one group of new workers to another.

Knowing your new workers

Young workers are perhaps the most easily recognized of the various types of new workers, likely because their age makes them, by definition, new to the workforce. But there are still several myths about the resiliency of young workers. The new safety guide dispels these misconceptions while also outlining several overlooked ways that the fresh faces in a workforce are at risk of injury.

Other types of new workers include laborers who have changed companies, people who have moved from one city to another and folks who may have found employment in a region that speaks a different language or has an unfamiliar culture. Each of these instances results in an employee ending up with an unfamiliar employer and, often, having a harder time fitting in than one might expect. It’s well understood that safety culture plays a huge role in injury outcomes and so it makes sense that a change in workplace culture can leave new hires more vulnerable.

As the guide points out, experienced workers who have switched roles or tasks may also be considered new workers. This may not be obvious on the surface, but the “core issue is a lack of experience at a worksite. As one report concludes, ‘the key risk factor is newness, not youth.’” An extensive work history may not matter if the specific job function is new to someone.

For all these differences, new workers have a few things in common. Fitting In Fast: Making a Safe Workspace for New Hires outlines how hazard recognition, stop-work authority and what it calls “the three C’s” all contribute to elevating the risk of incidents involving employees who have recently joined the workplace. It’s a clear-eyed breakdown of issues that are well worth reviewing.

Notably, the guide cites safety expert Larry Pearlman who discusses just how crucial the first 90 days on the job are to a worker’s safety outcomes. Given the increased likelihood of new hires getting hurt, it’s clear that protecting new-hires is as vital of a safety issue as any other concern.

Human factors and protecting new hires

The new worker safety guide outlines five keys to protecting new hires, from safety onboarding to building supervisor support for EHS initiatives. These include establishing a strong understanding of the various rights and responsibilities for workers, the employer and frontline leaders. The need to treat safety as an ongoing process rather than a box to be checked is also highlighted in the guide, along with the importance of building an active sense that safety is something that everyone must participate in—from keeping an eye out for hazards to staying vigilant to human factors and other major contributors to risk.

In this way, the guide presents a strong case for embedding human factors management principles into the onboarding process for new hires. This is an effective method to help new workers understand from day one that mental and physical states like rushing and fatigue can be major influences on injury potential. New hires will also see that their new company cares about them and is willing to take the extra steps to educate them on crucial safety issues. And lastly, it will communicate that employees have an active role to play in their own safety.

Of course, as the guide mentions, this is much easier to do if you have “a long-term partner [in human factors training], offering ongoing support for new worker onboarding. In these cases, be sure to talk to your trusted advisors whenever you bring new hires into the workplace.” If you don’t have one, then you can either do it yourself, or you can use this as an opportunity to investigate the possibility of implementing a human factors training initiative. Doing so will not only better protect new workers, but it will go a long way toward reducing injuries among the rest of your workforce as well.

Early interventions for long-term safety

There’s a lot that goes into new-worker safety. But the benefits are clear. Chief among them is that establishing a robust new-hire safety program will help you protect one of the most vulnerable groups of employees in the workplace.

Getting the initial months right not only reduces injuries, it also gets companies to follow best practices that set the stage for an employee’s full length of time at the job. The end result could include supervisors who offer a consistent and positive view of safety, as well as entrenching a strong culture, and clearly communicating a sense of safety rights and responsibilities.

Along the way, a proper new-hire safety orientation process could foster a more robust approach to ambiguity and other threats to stop-work authority, a common language for safety, and a better collective awareness of hazards and risk. All of this comes with the additional benefit of better retention rates and recouping the upfront cost associated with onboarding new employees.

New hire safety is hard. Their risk levels are sky-high, they’re at the mercy of all sorts of human factors and they likely don’t know where to turn for help. Taking steps to protect them is incredibly important, and can have reverberations throughout the company’s culture for years to come.

If you haven’t reviewed your approach to new worker safety in a while then now is a great time to give it another look. The new employee safety guide Fitting In Fast: Making a Safe Workspace for New Hires is a perfect way to start—it offers a big-picture view of the issues surrounding new worker safety while also outlining tactics, techniques and insights that you can use to protect people as soon as they step into the workplace for the very first time.