Copyright Inc. Magazine
The main finding of the recently released Pie Insurance 2025 State of Workplace Safety Report was the high percentage of small businesses involved in workplace accidents. Its survey of 1,018 company owners found 75 percent saying they’d had to manage worker injuries over the past year, and that 50 percent of those were preventable. Nearly a third of those entrepreneurs said on-the-job incidents had cost them an average of $20,000 per employee involved, as well four workdays typically lost while an employee recovered. That’s all part of the $176.5 billion toll workplace accidents cost employers annually in recent years. Most larger companies suffer even higher losses from accident than small business owners, with their average per-injury cost rising to $43,000. But if expenditures for accidents in founder-owned workplaces were less than half of those suffered by larger companies, smaller businesses outdid themselves in the category of strangest mishaps reported over the last year. Among what Pie Insurance charitably referred to as the “most unique and unusual” of those included truly strange accidents involving employees who: Refused to stop hitting golf balls in the workplace, causing another worker to be knocked out after being hit in the head by one Suffered third-degree burns after sitting on “a freshly cleaned hot office chair” Was knocked unconscious by a frozen fish propelled by a malfunctioning conveyor belt Slipped on a pickle in the lunchroom and cracked their spine Forgot to turn off the lights, leading to a blown fuse that caused burns to another employee the following day Choked on a bone at a Christmas party, resulting in a trip to the emergency room Stapled their hand instead of the document they were working on Authors of the Pie Insurance report further demonstrated their gift of comic understatement by citing incidents worthy of a workplace sitcom with the reminder that, “despite our best efforts, workplace safety can sometimes be affected by the most unexpected circumstances.” Nevertheless, some small business owners who participated in the survey were apparently determined to improve their workplace safety records — even if that meant anticipating improbable, and in some cases seemingly impossible accidents. As a result, new measures they introduced over the past year included:
