Small, newly founded businesses struggle to embed safety into their everyday operations. That is the finding of research by the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) in Ontario, Canada, for which researcher Basak Yanar interviewed 26 business owners about how they handle health and safety in practice. The conclusion: at new businesses, safety is often an afterthought until there is a direct trigger.
Only taken seriously after a trigger
Yanar, who is affiliated with the IWH and the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, drew her interviewees from 140 respondents to a broader survey of 351 companies, led by fellow researcher Linda Robson. That survey found that about 41 percent of businesses had set up no occupational health and safety management system at all, and that nearly 40 percent knew little or nothing about the hierarchy of controls, the basic order in which risks are best addressed.
The in-depth interviews showed that safety usually only gets attention after a concrete trigger: hiring the first employee, a client asking for proof of insurance, or a near-miss. As long as that trigger is absent, safety stays in the background next to the daily struggle of keeping the business running.
Personal experience counts more than regulation
According to Yanar, a new business’s approach to safety is shaped more strongly by the owner’s personal background and network than by laws and regulations. “A lot of new businesses are very relationally oriented,” says Yanar. Owners with prior experience in a high-risk sector often brought ingrained safety habits with them. A shopkeeper who had previously worked in mining recalled: “We had a health and safety meeting like every day.” For safety information, owners mainly rely on informal networks. According to Yanar, that points to unfamiliarity with, and poor access to, formal sources, not a preference for bad advice.
Employment relationships at new businesses are also often vague: contractors, family members, volunteers and employees overlap, which leaves it unclear who is responsible for safety. Psychological strain plays a role too; of the 26 people interviewed, only one sought professional support for business-related stress. A car wash owner quoted advice from his mentor: “Just embrace the suck.”
Roughly 100,000 new businesses with at least one employee start up in Canada every year. It is precisely this group that faces a heightened risk of injury, illness and fatal accidents, while the sector remains barely studied. Yanar recommends making safety information accessible already at business registration, rather than only after the first hire, and moving up registration with the WSIB and the link to a safety association. The WSIB, Ontario’s workplace injury insurer, has since cut the registration time for new businesses from 10 days to 10 minutes.
Context
The pattern Yanar observes in Canada is not unique to North America. Research by EU-OSHA among 162 micro and small businesses in nine European countries, not specifically new businesses, found similar bottlenecks: a reactive attitude that only kicks in after something has gone wrong, reliance on “common sense” as a safety measure, and underestimation of health risks relative to direct safety risks. That research, too, pointed out that national regulation and the socioeconomic context help determine how small businesses handle safety. Together, both studies underline that support is most effective when it reaches small business owners early and with a low threshold.
Source: New business owners often treat safety as an afterthought, study finds, 28 October 2026
Also reviewed: the EU-OSHA report “Safety and health in micro and small enterprises in the EU: the view from the workplace”
