ASSP Calls Out Safety Challenges for Profession
Yearly, ASSP gathers feedback from seasoned safety professionals during its Corporate Listening Tour. This initiative, led by ASSP CEO Jennifer McNelly, facilitates candid conversations with safety executives around the world to capture their key insights and feedback and to identify trends impacting the safety profession.
Last week it released its annual Corporate Listening Tour report, which identifies crucial safety challenges and emerging needs and opportunities for innovation that can help companies better align their safety strategies with industry demands to improve overall workplace safety.
Five critical themes in workplace environmental health and safety (EHS) emerged from this year’s report:
Workforce stability in safety and health: Addressing chronic skill gaps and rapid onboarding pressures as primary drivers of safety risk.
Safety and health is a value, not a metric: Integrating safety into the very fabric of operational excellence and business strategy.
Technology augments humanity: Embracing artificial intelligence (AI), automation and implementation of technology through a lens of ethics, transparency and trust-based adoption.
Health is infrastructure: Treating overall worker well-being, including mental health and psychological safety, as foundational to a productive workplace.
Leadership is relational: Empowering hybrid professionals who lead through influence and trust rather than authority alone.
“From what we’re hearing across the safety industry, it’s clear the time for passive observation has passed,” says McNelly, in a statement.
“The Corporate Listening Tour affirmed that as workplace complexity accelerates, safety can no longer operate as a standalone function. We’re at an exciting crossroads where safety is becoming a core business operating system rather than a functional checkbox, and we’re moving beyond understanding challenges to operationalizing solutions.”
Workforce Issues
The report also called out the fact that workforce conditions are no longer a background condition, but are in fact an EHS risk.
One way to address this, according to the report, is for the profession to be ready to hire and train people who come to the field from nontraditional career paths, such as skilled trades or operations.
"There’s not a lot of us left in the business... the things I learned the hard way are still up here in my head, and I teach the younger professionals every day... they’re just not getting exposed to that because AI and other modern tools will do it for them,” said Chet Brandon, senior director, Global EHS, Hexion, in the report.
And when new people are brought into the organization, there is pressure to onboard quickly due to high turnover. But it takes 12-18 months for workers to reach the safety proficiency of seasoned workers, and sometimes people leave before that time period.
The report offers some ways to improve this situation:
- Make safety, health and well-being, as well as business, financial and leadership
training, an integral part of frontline talent recruitment, retention and
engagement strategy. - Expect and implement continuous upskilling and reskilling.
- Partner with the HR team to make sure compensation is competitive and
appropriately aligned.