We spent two days at the Wisconsin Safety Council Annual Conference last month, and we have a bit of a bone to pick.
Not with anyone in the room. The people there care about safety. You could feel it. But there was a gap between what showed up in the data and what most of us would probably say if you asked whether safety was a priority. And it’s worth thinking about why that gap exists.
When safety and health professionals were asked how often they conduct safety walks with their staffing agency contact, the most common answer was never. When asked whether their current staffing provider participates in onsite incident investigations, the answer was rarely or never. This wasn’t a room of people who don’t care. It was a room of people who do, and who are still, for a lot of understandable reasons, running those relationships at a distance.
If you have contingent workers in your facility, even just a handful alongside a much larger permanent team, those workers are on your floor, running your equipment, operating inside your safety culture. And they’re often trying to make a good impression. That instinct is completely natural, and it’s also what puts them at risk. A new worker who isn’t sure about a task is more likely to push through than to slow down and ask. Not because they’re careless, but because they’re trying to show they can handle it.
All employees, permanent hires included, are most at risk when they’re new – typically in those first 30 days on the job. The learning curve is steep, the environment is unfamiliar, and the pressure to prove yourself is high. Most onboarding processes don’t treat that window the way it deserves to be treated.
Which brings us back to the staffing partner piece. If your agency isn’t included in safety walks, isn’t part of incident investigations, and isn’t learning in real time what’s happening on your floor, they’re working with incomplete information, and that has consequences.
A few things we’ve seen work well with our partners: pairing new workers with an experienced buddy who can pass along the unwritten floor knowledge that doesn’t live in any manual; using a tell-show-do approach before someone goes solo on a task; keeping a clear restricted task list for new employees and holding the line on it when production pressure hits; bringing your staffing partner into incident conversations, not as a formality but as part of the actual debrief; and tracking near-misses and good catches alongside the days-since-last-injury number.
None of this is particularly complicated. But it does require treating the staffing relationship as something more than transactional, especially around safety.
Because if your staffing partner never learns from what happens inside your facility, neither will the next employee walking onto your floor.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team