New research from the Institute for Work & Health reveals how safety habits take shape in small businesses
Most new business owners in Canada don’t think seriously about workplace safety until something forces the issue – hiring a first worker, a client asking for proof of coverage, or a near miss that could have gone worse. That is the central finding of new qualitative research presented on Tuesday as part of the Institute for Work & Health’s Speaker Series. Basak Yanar, a scientist at the Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, interviewed 26 Ontario entrepreneurs and found their approach to occupational health and safety (OHS) is shaped less by regulation than by who they are and who they know.
Hiring the first worker usually starts the safety conversation
Roughly 100,000 new businesses with at least one employee are created in Canada every year, close to 10 per cent of all existing businesses, Yanar told attendees. New businesses and their typically short-tenured workers both carry a higher risk of injury, illness and fatality, yet the sector remains understudied in OHS research.
Yanar’s interviews, drawn from a pool of 140 people who had taken part in an earlier 351-business survey led by Linda Robson, also of the Institute for Work & Health (IWH), found that hiring staff – not registering a business or opening its doors – was the most common trigger for owners to start thinking about safety management.
A recurring idea ran through almost every interview: the business is an extension of the owner. One retail business owner who had previously worked in the mining industry described how ingrained habits followed into the new venture: “We had a health and safety meeting like every day, so I was very familiar with safety. And because I was at it for so long, a lot of those things are kind of ingrained in me.” Owners without that background typically waited until a compliance requirement or safety issue surfaced before seeking help, a pattern Canadian Occupational Safety has reported plays out across small businesses nationally, where safety is seldom top of mind for owners juggling survival and growth.
Fuzzy employment lines blur who is responsible for safety
The study’s second major theme centred on employment relationships that were often loosely defined. Contractors, family members, volunteers and collaborators made up a large share of the workforce in these early-stage businesses, and formal payroll headcounts rarely reflected who was actually doing the work.
That ambiguity sometimes pointed toward potential misclassification. One landscaping business owner described the balancing act directly: “I require my sole proprietors to have their own liability insurance, but I also know that if I wanted to hire them on as employees, I could pay for my independent contractors’ WSIB. If they weren’t able to do it for themselves, I really think that being protected is important.” Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) has recently moved to shorten that learning curve, cutting the time it takes to register a new business from 10 days to 10 minutes as part of a broader push to ease small business compliance.
The data backs this up: in the 351-business survey Yanar referenced, about 41 per cent of respondents had not initiated any OHS management – no legal research, no employee discussions, no training – and close to 40 per cent knew little or nothing about the hierarchy of controls. Owners told Yanar they leaned on informal peer networks for safety information, which she said reflected a lack of awareness and access to formal resources rather than a preference for bad advice.
The mental toll runs deeper than the paperwork
A theme Yanar didn’t expect to dominate as much as it did was the psychological strain of ownership. One catering business owner described the pressure of being solely accountable for every mistake: “In that first year of getting things sort of figured out, every other day there was something I had to figure out, and it was so stressful and so upsetting. I was having sort of dissociative moments where I’d just be staring into the void.” A car wash owner leaned on a mentor’s advice to get through it: “Just embrace the suck. That’s what my mentor says. It sucks. It’s going to be busy, but you just have to embrace that.”
Only one participant described seeking professional mental health support tied to business stress, even though many owners were well aware of supports available to their own employees. Canadian employers have long been urged to treat psychological health with the same seriousness as physical safety, and Yanar’s findings suggest new business owners are an overlooked group in that effort.
Get there before the first hire, researcher says
Asked what the system should prioritize, Yanar pointed to a recommendation from Robson’s earlier presentation: deliver accessible OHS information, potentially through a short mandatory course, at the point of business registration – before the current lag in which WSIB registration and connection to a health and safety association typically happen only after a business hires its first employee.
“A lot of new businesses are very relationally oriented,” Yanar said. “So I think finding those kind of points of contact with them and creating those relationships [matters] ... if we have a really strong health and safety system that works for everybody, it’s going to work for small businesses as well.”
