Every year, thousands of safety articles, blog posts, guides and white papers are published. The collective insight provided in all these pieces of writing is staggering. But not all safety content is the same, and a handful of these safety articles always stand out from the crowd thanks to their relevant insights and inspiring advice.
We’ve gathered some of the best safety articles and guides from 2024. Whether you missed them when they were first published or you want to revisit these articles to refresh your knowledge, you’ll find it well worth your while to read everything in this standout collection of safety writing.
Workplace ergonomics
Last year started off with a firecracker of an article on workplace ergonomics. It’s a relatively short piece, found in the pages of Safety+Health magazine. And what it lacks in length it makes up in insight.
Rather than offer the usual advice on ergonomic safety, author Jaime McKeown offers an overview of why your ergo program might be failing to gain traction. As she says, “Have you heard the adage, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink’? When it comes to ergonomics injuries, you can provide the proper training and equipment, but if additional measures aren’t taken by workers, they’ll end up being pretty parched.”
The article points out human factors and safety culture as two key determinants of ergonomic success, and the entire piece functions as a compass to help you reorient your workplace ergo program for more sustainable results.
Construction safety
The ergonomics article opened with a maxim about horses and water, and another interesting safety article—this one about construction safety—might as well have started with this truism about the certainty of change attributed to author John Maxwell: “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.”
As safety columnist Ray Prest pointed out in the March issue of Occupational Health & Safety magazine, there are a lot of safety lessons to be learned from a construction industry in flux. In particular, Prest notes that the evolving dynamics of the labor market means that safety professionals have a bigger role than ever to play in employee retention and company productivity.
It’s a fascinating and wide-ranging article that introduces three safety interventions to help organizations “ride the fluctuating waves of risk.” And it’s worth your attention even if you don’t work in the construction sector since, as the article says, “these types of interventions are more likely to have staying power in almost any industry.”
Ambiguity and stop-work authority
Sticking with last year’s prevailing theme of uncertainty, the next standout safety article from 2024 is about ambiguity and the effect it has on stop-work authority. Safety consultant Tim Page-Bottorff writes in the Professional Safety Journal that ambiguity is a psychosocial risk that “can directly lead to elevated risk levels in several ways, from skewed perceptions of risk to uncertainty about one’s ability to speak up about concerning work conditions.”
After outlining the specific ways that ambiguity can hamper workers’ willingness to temporarily pause work if they have safety concerns, Page-Bottorff offers some interesting ways to mitigate the effects of ambiguity—not to mention other human factors—when it comes to stop-work authority.
While there are no silver bullets, the article suggests that a small set of soft skills, as well as a focus on relationships and improving confidence while also reducing fear can all reduce the presence of ambiguity. The end result is a more productive workplace and fewer injuries among workers, especially when it comes to new hires.
New-hire safety
Speaking of new-hire safety, a trio of outstanding pieces take a look at the ins and outs of keeping new employees safe in their first weeks and months on the job. And while that seems like a lot of coverage for a single topic, it makes sense when you consider that “a third of all injuries happen to employees who have been at their workplace for less than a year.” That statistic is courtesy of a new-hire safety webinar titled Keeping Workers Safe: The First 90 Days. Presented by safety expert Larry Pearlman, the webinar offers a ton of useful tips and insights into keeping new workers safe, including some quick wins and a compelling look at how to use the first three months of a worker’s tenure to set the stage for a long and productive employer/employee relationship.
Picking up where the webinar left off, a safety article in Occupational Health & Safety magazine argues that the safety stakes are high in new-hire onboarding not only because of the immediate injury risk but because the “new hire onboarding process can also heavily determine people’s view of safety.” As a result, how things go in the first handful of months could affect safety outcomes for years down the road.
And if you want something more comprehensive on the subject of new-hire safety, the new-worker guide Fitting in Fast: Making a Safe Workplace for New Hires has you covered. It provides a detailed look at the issue, beginning by showing that the “new worker” label encompasses several different members of an organization, from young employees to people who have changed jobs to long-tenured folks who have switched roles. Each of these workers faces different risks and safety professionals need to be aware of the distinction between each group.
From there, the guide offers a tour of the key aspects of protecting new hires, providing a road map to long-term efforts to protect one of the workforce’s most vulnerable types of employees.
Hand safety
On the topic of vulnerability, perhaps the most at-risk body part is the hand, based on the fact that hands are among the most frequently injured parts of the body. When you add the fact that every major industry sees droves of serious hand injuries every year, it’s clear that no one’s hands are completely safe in the workplace.
One of the strongest pieces of safety writing from last year was the hand safety guide Insights and Strategies to Prevent Hand Injuries. It’s based on a rigorous survey of hundreds of safety professionals, and the results of that survey highlight some existing best practices and also offer surprising insights into the causes of—and solutions to—hand incidents.
The guide to hand safety is much too detailed to be summarized here. But the data it provides, as well as the five major interventions it suggests will be particularly effective at protecting workers’ hands, make it a critical resource for safety professionals.
Conclusion
Clearly, 2024 was a stellar year for safety writing. From new-worker safety to ergonomics, there is plenty of research, insight and analysis to help safety professionals tackle their thorniest problems.
It’s worth noting that great safety advice isn’t confined to articles and guides—last year saw the release of many informative safety webinars as well. There is one in particular that is must-watch material. It’s a webinar on storytelling in safety called Unleashing the Power of Stories: Level-up Safety Culture with Three Easy Storytelling Tools, and it does a tremendous job of explaining the necessity of leveraging stories for better safety outcomes and then giving safety folks the tools to do so.
Supported by a set of storytelling resources, the webinar can provide a useful framework for taking the insights from all of these safety articles and putting them into action in an effective manner. So read the articles and guides, watch the webinar and then get ready to make this the safest year yet!