Majority of safety leaders plan to boost budgets, training as workplace incidents persist: global survey

First-of-its-kind state of workplace safety report by Blackline Safety reveals disconnect between protocol and practice, highlighting need for integrated approach to protect workers.

With lost-time workplace incidents remaining high worldwide – to the tune of hundreds of millions of work-related injuries and illnesses occurring annually – 95% of safety leaders plan to maintain or increase their budgets over the next two years. 

That’s the finding of a recent study commissioned by leading connected safety technology provider Blackline Safety – and conducted by independent research firm NewtonX – which surveyed 200 senior safety and operations professionals globally at companies with at least 500 employees about current industry practices and future outlooks.

The results are compiled in a first-of-its kind Keeping People Safe: Global Data on the State of Workplace Safety report, which is accessible free of charge.

According to the survey, 97% of safety leaders believe workplace safety is fundamental to reliable productivity. Still, despite heavily investing in health and safety and understanding the tie to business health, 64% of those queried see a gap between safety protocol and real-world behaviour.

“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-behaviour gap, creating safer and more productive workplaces.”

She cited feedback from those surveyed that 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,” Gillies said. “Most organisations have all three, yet few have them working together, which means gaps persist even when investment increases.”

Other report highlights include:

• Safety leaders’ top five budget priorities are worker training (46%), workforce engagement (41%), improvements of infrastructure to reduce risk (34%), new technology (30%) and internal advocacy to promote value of safety (29%).
• Nearly one third of respondents see better training as a path to greater worker trust – not more training, but training that's relevant, continuous, two-way, and builds on a culture of safety, rather than being top-down.
• When it comes to setting safety targets, 76% of safety leaders say zero incident goals persist but are unrealistic.
• Organisations 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% of workers have a great deal of trust in their companies’ tools and procedures, while 92% have some level of trust.
• 65% of leaders expect AI risk prediction tools to become increasingly key. In particular, they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in AI tools when it comes to safety data analytics and reporting (84%), training and simulation (83%) and predictive risk analytics (79%).
• While most respondents (73%) indicate they review incident reports and near-miss records, only a third (33.5%) spend time on predictive analytics to forecast risk, which has the potential to stop or reduce similar incidents from happening in the future.

Download the report here.