The majority of safety leaders plan to maintain or increase their budgets over the next two years as workplace incidents persist globally. In a recent study, Keeping People Safe: Global Data on the State of Workplace Safety, most respondents said they will focus on training and engaging workers, as well as investing in new technology.
The report, commissioned by Canadian safety technology provider Blackline Safety and conducted by NewtonX, surveyed 200 senior safety and operations professionals at companies worldwide with at least 500 employees on current industry practices and future outlooks.
“It’s clear from the survey that a majority of experts support a change in safety culture across industries,” said Christine Gillies, chief product and marketing officer at Blackline Safety. “As a result, we’ll see safety increasingly becoming a holistic, enterprise-wide operating system instead of a compliance function, and companies that treat it this way will close the protocol-behavior gap, creating safer and more productive workplaces.”
Feedback from those surveyed points to potential reasons for this gap, including disconnections between people, process, and technology, a lack of understanding of a worksite’s day-to-day realities by protocol-creators, and additional processes being created that fail to address root causes of safety issues.
“Three pillars make up a strong safety culture – training and communication, tools and technology, and data and reporting,” added Gillies. “Most organizations have all three, yet few have them working together, which means gaps persist even when investment increases.”
Safety leaders stated their top five budget priorities are worker training (46 per cent), workforce engagement (41 per cent), improvements of infrastructure to reduce risk (34 per cent), new technology (30 per cent), and internal advocacy to promote the value of safety (29 per cent).
Organizations are investing in a multitude of safety tools and devices to meet safety, compliance, and productivity needs, including Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), walkie-talkies/radios, and advanced technologies. Yet leaders said only 36 per cent of workers have a great deal of trust in their companies’ tools and procedures, while 92 per cent have some level of trust.
Nearly one third of respondents see relevant, continuous and two-way training as a key way to build worker trust, rather than relying on a top-down approach.
Looking to the future, an estimated 65 per cent of leaders expect AI risk prediction tools to become increasingly important. In particular, they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in AI tools when it comes to safety data analytics and reporting, training and simulation, and predictive risk analytics. While most respondents said they review incident reports and near-miss records, only a third spend time on predictive analytics to forecast risk.
