2020 was a hugely stressful year for most small business owners, not least due to the challenges involved in ensuring that staff were kept as safe as possible from the virus.  New research from the Colorado School of Public Health (ColoradoSPH) explores the changes in the professional and personal lives of employees during Covid, and how their perception of workplace safety altered.

The research attempted to understand whether the health and safety climate within firms were related to the ultimate wellbeing employees felt during the pandemic.  They distributed a Covid-specific employee survey to a group of nearly 500 employees spread across 30 small businesses in Colorado.

“When the pandemic hit last spring, we knew that work changed significantly. We wanted to understand how the small businesses in our SSWell study were responding to the pandemic and how this was related to their employees’ health,” the researchers explain.

A strong connection

The research revealed a strong connection between the wellbeing of employees and the perceived strength of health and safety measures during the pandemic.  This link remained even during significant changes to things such as the ability to work, social contacts being reduced, and changes to childcare.

“Safety and health climates may influence employee well-being even when other disruptions occur, suggesting that during emergencies, small businesses with strong climates may be better prepared to maintain employee well-being,” the researchers explain.

The researchers hope that their findings will encourage organizations to take health and safety more seriously, given its clear implications for employee wellbeing.

“Businesses cannot always predict when an emergency is going to happen, but they can create a working environment that supports their employees’ health, safety, and well-being” the researchers say. “In doing so, they have laid a foundation for how to successfully respond to an emergency.”

Shirking responsibilities

Interestingly, research from Oregon State University suggests that it’s more likely to be the best-resourced organizations that shirk their responsibilities to provide a safe work environment rather than the kind of small businesses studied by the Colorado team.

The study suggests that when it’s cheaper to pay small fines for safety violations than it is to actually provide safe workplaces, many organizations will choose the path of least financial resistance.

“Organizations that do not provide a safe workplace gain an economic advantage over those that do,” the researchers say. “The goal of improving the longevity of a business conflicts with the goal of protecting the workforce.”