Prevention Is the Priority: Rethinking Safety for Small Business Workforces

Small businesses can boost safety and cut costs by making prevention part of daily routines—not just a reaction to accidents.

• By Carla Woodard
• Jun 13, 2025

In small business environments, safety isn’t a policy, it’s personal. It’s a responsibility that lives with owners and employees alike, especially when the person setting safety protocols is also managing shifts, running payroll, and performing the work themselves. With limited resources and lean teams, the ripple effect of a workplace injury goes far beyond the workplace. It affects morale, team trust, and sometimes, the very survival of the business.

That’s why, this National Safety Month, we’re encouraging small business owners who are responsible for the safety and health of their employees and workplaces, to shift focus from a reactive mindset to a preventative one. Whether running a two-person crew or overseeing multiple job sites, safety begins long before an incident report is filed.

Pie Insurance’s 2025 Workplace Safety Report found that 75% of small businesses experienced at least one injury last year, and nearly 50% of those injuries were considered preventable. These preventable events aren’t outliers, they’re patterns. Slips, trips, and strain injuries often result from gaps in training, inconsistent safety practices, or lack of adequate equipment.

Why Small Changes Matter

The good news? Small changes in how safety is approached can have outsized impact. According to the report, reducing just half of preventable injuries could save small businesses an average annual out of pocket savings (workers’ compensation, medical expenses, and/or legal costs) of up to $10,000 or more. However, cost savings are only part of the equation. True prevention takes root when safety becomes more than just a task, but a part of how a team works together, communicates, and holds each other accountable. That shift starts with culture, and that’s a major difference for companies operating on tight margins.

A Culture Gap, Not Just a Policy Gap

Small business owners overwhelmingly value safety, a sentiment that came through clearly in Pie’s survey, where 91% of respondents said they feel confident in their ability to maintain a safe work environment. However, when the owner is also the lead technician or general manager, there’s often limited time or bandwidth to formalize prevention strategies, and when they do, they often encounter resistance.

Pie’s data shows that 42% of owners cite employee resistance as a barrier to implementing safety improvements:

• 36% said employees think protocols are unnecessary
• 32% said they forget to follow them
• 27% said their team lacks motivation

This resistance can lead to shortcuts, skipped checks, or complacency, especially when team members are under pressure to move fast. In these environments, safety procedures are sometimes viewed as “nice to have,” rather than essential to keeping operations running.

Safety culture isn’t about rules on a poster. It’s about habits that are reinforced, modeled, and prioritized, even when no one’s watching.

Prevention Is Practical and Profitable

There’s often a misconception that safety upgrades require large investments or time-consuming overhauls. Many preventable injuries stem from avoidable issues: poor visibility, worn flooring, missing PPE, or outdated procedures. Addressing these doesn’t require a six-figure budget, just intentionality.

Data from the National Safety Council shows that the average cost of a medically consulted workplace injury is more than $43,000. Even for small businesses that experience a single claim per year, that cost can ripple through the business via lost labor, downtime, and increased premiums.

Yet, many business owners only act after an incident. Prevention starts by making safety part of the rhythm of daily work. That means visible leadership, easy-to-follow processes, and regular reinforcement.

Four Ways to Make Safety Stick

A growing body of research reinforces the value of these efforts. A 2024 article published in the American Journal of Public Health highlighted that many workplace injuries across industries remain preventable, and that systems-based prevention strategies, those embedded into daily work, consistently lead to better safety outcomes. For small businesses, this could mean weaving prevention into daily routines rather than treating safety as an occasional compliance task. Small businesses don’t need a safety department to create a safer workplace. What they need is knowledge, structure, visibility, and consistency.

Here are four practical ways to help build a stronger safety culture:

• Make Safety a Daily Ritual: Start every shift with a short check-in. Walk through tools, equipment, or known site risks. These few minutes can prevent hours of downtime and send a strong message about what matters most.

• Use Your Team’s Knowledge: Often, the people closest to the work know where hazards exist. Build a feedback loop into operations; invite workers to share what feels risky or inefficient and act on what you hear.

• Document and Reinforce: Even simple incident tracking, whether through a digital app or clipboard checklist, can highlight where problems occur. Look for trends and communicate what you’re learning. Safety data becomes powerful when it leads to action.

• Lead By Doing: In small businesses, leadership is often hands-on. When the owner wears proper PPE, pauses to check gear, or follows lockout/tagout, it sets the tone. Employees take cues from what leadership models, not just what they say.

Safety as a Mindset, not a Mandate

Injury prevention is ultimately about empowering people, giving workers the tools, time, and support they need to do their jobs safely. It’s also about recognizing that prevention isn’t a single action, but a mindset: one that sees every task as an opportunity to reduce risk before harm occurs. Thankfully, many small businesses are already doing this work, they just haven’t labeled it as prevention. A deli owner who reminds staff to wipe spills right away, a roofer who always double-checks harnesses, a contractor who stops work to walk through a near-miss, these are all signs of a strong safety mindset.

To make prevention sustainable, it needs to be consistent, and needs to be baked into operations, not just introduced after an injury. Start with one change, one checklist, one habit, one expectation. Then build from there.

This National Safety Month let’s recognize that most injuries aren’t freak accidents. They’re the result of missed opportunities to act. By putting prevention at the heart of a safety strategy, small businesses can do more than save dollars and reduce claims. They will protect their most important asset: their people.