Companies that have strong safety cultures invest in the growth and protection of those cultures from the very beginning of an employee’s time with them. Safety awareness and strong support beliefs should be talked about in interviews and followed up on through reference checks. Sure, some potential new hires will tell you what they think you want to hear, and if you don’t exercise your due diligence in confirming what you’ve been told, you may discover you have inherited somebody else’s safety problem.

Safety training then becomes an integral part of onboarding and the first year of employment. You are asking for a new hire to drink from a fire hose, getting used to internal processes and programs, but none will be more important than basic, fundamental safety policies that the company believes in, and has proven success with. Specific safety training doesn’t happen through osmosis – they aren’t going to magically pick stuff up and make it part of their daily mantra without knowing how important it is to the culture they’ve joined. Intensive blocks of classroom and handson instruction, and real-life real-time examples on active jobsites will be required to infuse safety DNA into a new-hire’s success in the new job. Exposure to OSHA 10 and OSHA 30 training should be part of that intensive process, giving their training credibility and protecting the company from negligent training liability.

If you are lucky, a new hire will have already embraced the idea of safety being the foundation for success for them, their job, and their new company. They may rise to the top of the safety champion list on a jobsite in short order, and may be eager to participate in training, monitor safety in the jobsite, and share ideas about how to make things safer in their own tasks – value that eagerness, and cultivate it. Nurture it. Their willingness to believe in something so fundamental and then share it with others can be just as contagious as cynicism, and their job-specific performance will become critical to your ability to retain them as a long-term employee.

Fundamental, rigid safety requirements will also tell you a lot about where your problems may come from, as some new hires will simply attempt to skate by, leaning on old habits or old examples taught by the wrong fellow employees, past and present. Zero-tolerance issues will be tested, and afford you an opportunity for training, coaching and mentoring. They will also afford you clear-cut avenues to avoid negligent retention liability.

Documentation of the hiring, training and retention-through-performance steps in a new career are critical parts of building and maintaining strong safety cultures in any business, developing long-term valuable employees, and succession planning through development of internal candidates with upward mobility. Documentation of a committed process will also help you avoid the pitfalls associated with a bad hiring decision, which do occasionally happen to the best of us. Wrongful termination may harder to disprove without it, so the “ounce of prevention” is well worth the investment, from the very beginning, when chasing “the pound of cure”.