Summer Safety Series
Welcome to The Science Behind Workplace Injuries: 30 Days of Summer Safety, where we explore the environmental hazards, human physiology, behavioral science, and organizational decisions shaping workplace safety. This article is part of our July series examining the science behind workplace injuries and the factors influencing workplace safety during the summer months.
Experience remains one of the strongest protective factors in workplace safety. Employees who understand their jobs, recognize hazards, and have developed technical skills are injured less frequently than new workers still learning unfamiliar tasks. Experience matters. It improves judgment, efficiency, and confidence. Yet one of the most persistent misconceptions in workplace safety is believing experience eliminates fall risk.
Data tells a more nuanced story. New employees experience higher injury rates, while experienced workers often sustain more serious fall injuries when incidents occur. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers between the ages of 55 and 64 experienced the highest number of occupational fatalities in 2023, with falls, slips, and trips remaining one of the leading causes of death. At the same time, the Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index estimates same-level falls and falls to a lower level cost employers approximately $16.3 billion annually, making falls one of the costliest causes of workplace injury in the United States.
At first glance, those findings seem contradictory. If experience improves safety, why do experienced workers continue experiencing serious falls? The answer begins with how the brain learns.
As we explored in earlier articles, repeated practice gradually shifts familiar tasks from deliberate thinking to automatic processing. Jens Rasmussen’s Skill-Rule-Knowledge framework explains that experienced employees spend much of their workday operating at the skill-based level, where movements occur quickly and efficiently with very little conscious effort. James Reason later expanded this concept through his Generic Error Modeling System, showing that slips and lapses are the characteristic errors of highly experienced workers rather than novices. Expertise creates efficiency. Efficiency also creates opportunities for attention to drift away from the mechanics of the task.
Walking across a familiar warehouse floor, stepping off equipment, climbing the same ladder, or navigating the same staircase rarely feels like a task requiring careful thought. The brain has performed those movements thousands of times before. Procedural memory stored within the basal ganglia allows those actions to occur almost automatically. That neurological efficiency is one of the brain’s greatest strengths. It also explains why experienced employees sometimes experience what appears to be a simple misstep. The fall often begins long before the foot slips. It begins when conscious attention quietly shifts somewhere else.
Age adds another important layer. Knowledge and judgment generally continue improving throughout a career, although physiological changes gradually influence balance, reaction time, vision, muscle strength, and proprioception. Research published through NIOSH’s National Center for Productive Aging and Work shows those physical changes become increasingly important as employees age. Experience continues strengthening decision-making. The body gradually becomes less forgiving when balance is lost or recovery must occur in a fraction of a second. Falls become less frequent than they were early in a career. They often become more serious.
Behavioral science provides another important piece of the puzzle. Diane Vaughan’s work on normalization of deviance demonstrated repeated success gradually changes what people consider normal. A worker steps over the same hose every morning without incident. A ladder is climbed without maintaining three points of contact because nothing happened the day before. A small patch of uneven pavement becomes part of the landscape instead of a recognized hazard. The environment has not become safer. Repeated exposure has simply changed the brain’s perception of risk.
Human perception also adapts to repeated success. Gerald Wilde’s Theory of Risk Homeostasis proposes people tend to maintain a personally acceptable level of risk. When experience, confidence, or new safety equipment makes a task feel safer, individuals may unconsciously accept slightly greater risk because the overall situation still feels within their comfort zone. The adjustment is rarely intentional. It reflects the brain’s ongoing effort to balance efficiency, confidence, and perceived danger.
Research on attention reaches a similar conclusion. In one study involving construction supervisors, inattentional blindness accounted for approximately half of the failures in hazard recognition. Participants looked directly at potential hazards without consciously recognizing them because their attention had already been committed elsewhere. We explored this concept in our article on situational awareness. Looking is not the same as seeing. Experienced employees often know exactly what to look for. Automatic processing sometimes determines what the brain notices.
Workers’ compensation professionals see the consequences every day. A fall may appear to result from one misplaced foot, although the contributing factors often developed over years. Familiarity, automaticity, age-related physiological changes, production pressure, divided attention, and environmental conditions frequently interact before the incident ever occurs. The fracture, shoulder injury, or traumatic brain injury represents the final event in a much longer sequence. Understanding that sequence allows organizations to prevent more injuries than simply reminding employees to watch their step.
Leadership creates an opportunity to interrupt automatic behavior before it becomes a serious injury. Refreshing job hazard analyses, rotating tasks when appropriate, encouraging experienced employees to mentor newer workers, conducting peer observations, and openly discussing near misses all help restore deliberate attention to routine work. Ergonomic improvements, slip-resistant surfaces, better lighting, housekeeping, and thoughtful accommodations for an aging workforce strengthen safety by supporting both the brain and the body. Prevention becomes more effective when organizations recognize that expertise deserves continued support rather than fewer safeguards.
Experienced workers remain one of an organization’s greatest strengths. Seasoned employee’s judgment, technical knowledge, and ability to solve problems cannot be replaced. The goal is never questioning their expertise. The goal is recognizing that the same neurological efficiency making expertise possible can also reduce conscious awareness during familiar tasks. The strongest safety cultures respect experience while continuing to challenge routine. Curiosity keeps expertise growing because it encourages people to notice what yesterday’s success might otherwise persuade them to overlook.
Tomorrow in The Science Behind Workplace Injuries – Emerging Infectious Diseases Every Employer Should Watch. Workplace health threats continue evolving as climates change, travel increases, and new pathogens emerge. Tomorrow, we examine the infectious diseases employers should understand, how occupational exposure differs across industries, and why preparation begins long before the first case appears.
