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The frequency and costs of workplace accidents leave entrepreneurs particularly vulnerable, because they have a much bigger impact on smaller companies. The latest annual study by Denver-based Pie Insurance detailed the rate and financial impact of those mishaps to small-business owners, and listed some of the weirdest incidents in the past year.
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 accidents 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”
- Were 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:
- Requiring employees to have their pupils checked before using ladders to ensure they’re not under the influence of prohibited substances
- Instituting a “no high-heels” rule to reduce foot and ankle injuries from long hours of walking on hard floors
- Prohibiting employees from making their own coffee to prevent burns, with only managers being allowed to operate brewing machines
- Establishing a “no drone zone” policy after an employee’s aerial hobby became a workplace safety hazard
- Banning chewing gum after an improperly disposed wad resulted in a worker’s injury
And last but not least, there was the small-business owner who formally prohibited employees from swatting golf balls in the workplace, after learning the painful and costly lesson of that activity one too many times already.
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Bruce Crumley
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