From Insight to Action:

Good morning. I'm Kelly Rose, editor of Health and Safety Matters magazine, and thank you for joining me today. If you want to receive a record copy of HSM, you can head over to our website hsmsearch dot com. You can also subscribe to our newsletters from this site.

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So today's webinar, From Insight to Turning Global Safety Trends into Operational Reality is sponsored by BlackLine Safety. Before we start, I'll go over a few housekeeping points. We would like this session to be as interactive as possible, so if you have a question for today's presenters you can submit it using the box below and we will try to get through as many of these as we can at the end of the presentation.

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So that's all the housekeeping out of the way. So let's start today's webinar and I'll now hand over to James Skipper to begin. Hi, James.

Hi Kelly, thank you and thanks everyone for joining us today.

I'm James Skipper, Manager of Client Success here at BlackLine Safety and here with me I have Hugh Maxwell, CEO of Safety, an internationally respected risk and HSE professional who shares a vested interest in the findings and learnings of our new global research report. Today we'll be sharing insights from that report, keeping people safe.

This research looks at how workplace safety is changing and why outcomes aren't keeping pace with investment and what organisations can do to close that gap.

So before we dive in, a quick introduction. So my background includes more than two decades in IT and technology, working with customers to deliver innovation and.

At BlackLine, I lead our client success team across Europe, Middle East and Africa, working with our customers to drive meaningful action from data and ensuring that they maximize the value of their investment in our products and services.

It's great to be here today to share insights from the Keeping People Safe report, and I'm really pleased to be joined by Hugh Maxwell for his perspective. Hugh?

Many thanks, James. It's both an honor and a pleasure for me to meet and share with yourself, the teams from HSM and BlackLine Safety and our esteemed audience the findings of this report. My name is Hugh Maxwell, an international HSM risk professional, more than thirty five years under my belt working across a range of high risk industries, including the offshore, manufacturing, mining, heavy industries, and many other projects in over fifty countries around the globe. My main focus really has been strengthening risk management, operational safety, and leadership performance. As you said, I'm managing director of Maxwell Safety, and nowadays a large part of my work really focuses on helping organizations move beyond purely compliance and towards developing much stronger safety cultures, visible leadership, stronger psychological safety, and ultimately better operational decision making.

And this really is achieved through largely translating data, incorporating and aligning workforce insights with operational realities into what we can make to be practical actions that both improve safety performance and organisational resilience, and ultimately the overall sustainable profitability of businesses. On top of all of the HSE risk qualification I hold, I've got a number of fellowships, IRASWISM Institute of Leadership and a Master's degree in TQM.

Thank you Hugh.

So first a little bit about the methodology used which is both qualitative and quantitative.

We commissioned a leading third party research partner, NEUTINEx, for this study.

It was conducted on a fully anonymous basis, meaning respondents were not informed that BlackLine commissioned the study.

The work included a survey of two hundred safety and operations leaders across the US, Canada, UK, Europe and Australia. It spanned six industries: oil and gas, petrochemical, manufacturing, utilities, fire and house mat and transport. And it included companies between five hundred and twenty five thousand employees engaged at senior level including managers, directors, VPs and C suite with direct responsibility for HSD. It also included in-depth interviews with respondents across industries, regions, and roles spanning both safety and operations, so we could capture a full and nuanced picture of how organizations are thinking about safety today.

So let's start with safety and productivity.

These are not mutually exclusive.

Across the board of those we surveyed, ninety seven percent believe that workplace safety is fundamental to reliable productivity.

So let's talk about that.

Hugh, is this something that rings true for you?

Absolutely James. The ninety seven percent is not simply a safety stat. It's a statement about operational reliability, about the workforce confidence, and about the business resilience that exists. And across the industries I've worked in, as I mentioned, whether it's been offshore manufacturing, mining, or major infrastructure work, the highest performance organisations are consistently the organisations that have the strongest safety culture, the clearest visible leadership, and with it the best operational discipline in what they do.

So safety and productivity are often misrepresented as being competing priorities. That's not the case, because in reality poor safety is usually symptomatic of something of a wider organisation stability.

So when when organizations are actually working and all these things come together, that's when we know safety and productivity are aligned.

Organizations that struggle with poor communication failures, poor planning, poor accountability, and unclearness, fatigue or operational pressure, the same weaknesses impact upon the quality, delivery reliability, and ultimately the commercial performance of the business. And I've seen this very clear recently on some of the projects I've worked offshore, particularly in complex simultaneous operation environments where you may have multiple vessels, different contractors, and high performance activities operating at the same time where people are under significant schedule pressure. And the projects that perform best in these situations aren't the ones where they're driving the people the hardest, but where the ones where you can create stable systems, clear communication, very disciplined and regular and timely interfaces, and an environment where people feel confident to raise whatever concerns they have at the earliest possible opportunity.

Thanks Hugh.

In the UK and across Europe, IOH and wider European research consistently confirm organisations investing in health and safety see truly measurable results, not only through reduced incidents, but improved operational efficiency, lower absence, stronger retention and greater workforce engagement.

Studies indicate returns of approximately two pounds to three pounds for every one pound invested in workplace safety and health initiatives.

The conversation today goes even further than traditional cost savings, don't you think Hugh?

Very much my friend, you're right James. The real value lies in the organisational resilience. The organisations need people making good decisions when they're constantly under pressure, and that can only happen where you've created the trust, you've got the strong communication, and you've got really strong leadership in place. So safety is no longer simply about meeting compliance or preventing injury as the overall goal, it's much more about having the clearest indicators that organisational maturity and operational excellence come from the actual platform of strong safety. And the organisations that manage safety well, that manage change well, lead people well, communicate well, perform well operationally have all these factors working together. So this is why safety and productivity are not mutually exclusive anymore and never have been in high organizations. They are very much interconnected James.

Okay, so with the link between safety and productivity being so well understood, it's not surprising to see here that ninety five percent of safety budgets will maintain or increase in the next two years.

Looking at those top five budget priorities, we can see a real focus on people with training and engagement topping the list, but with investment in new technology also seen as important.

Hugh, is this what you would have expected?

Certainly James, it is yes, and it's one of the most important findings in the report I think, which reflects a significant significant shift in how organisations are actually viewing safety and risk.

Historically, the safety budgets have been really reactive or compliance driven, where some organizations really invested not because they wanted to, but because they had to. But what we're seeing now is that leading organizations recognize that safety and risk are strategic investments, and these are linked to the operational resilience I mentioned, the workforce stability, and longer term stronger business performance. And the fact that ninety five percent of organisations plan to either maintain or increase their safety investment is a really strong indicator that at board level and with senior managers, they're actually beginning to understand that safety is one of the foundations of sustainable performance within the business.

So for me it's really encouraging that investments now being directed differently. It's no longer focused on traditional compliance training or on where we have the lagging metrics lying. Organizations are increasingly investing in leadership capability, in engaging the workforce, in selecting new technology, in operational visibility, in creating mental well-being for the workers, in enhancing human performance, and really better risk intelligence overall. So for me that is a major maturity shift James.

Yeah, so how does that translate into organisational improvement?

Well really James, terms of the organisation improvement, the organisations that perform well are the ones that create the best operational conditions that allow the people to succeed both safety and consistently.

The biggest improvements never come from adding more procedures. They come much more from improving the communication, from strengthening the engagement and visibility of the leadership, from managing operational pressures more effectively, and really, again, creating this environment where people can speak up as early as possible. And this is where I think technology is also becoming increasingly important, because the fact that organizations can now access real time data, connect their worker technologies with this, have a better and predictive insight, allowing them to identify emerging risks maturely than before, these are absolutely great tools going forward.

But technology alone is not the solution. The real value comes when the organization combine sorry, combine the data they have with strong leadership behaviors, with enhanced trust of the workers, and with operational learning. So instead of asking the time old question, are we compliant? They've started asking questions such as, are our people engaged?

Do our leaders create this trust? And can our teams make good decisions under pressure, which is really important, particularly in high risk environments? And equally do we identify weak signals early enough so we can prevent them escalating? So for me this is a very different conversation and one which is much stronger strategically for organisations.

Okay, so this is something worth digging into because we just talked about safety budgets increasing, but what we're hearing from safety leaders is that now those budgets need to perform.

The data here shows that despite heavily investing in health and safety and understanding its link to business health, sixty four percent of organisations still report a protocol behaviour gap. That's to say the systems they've set up to maintain worksite safety aren't always followed by the people who actually have to work within those systems.

Hugh, does this number surprise you?

Unfortunately not, James, it doesn't surprise me. Sadly, the finding in many ways reflects one of the biggest challenges that most organisations are facing globally today. Whilst many organisations have already got strong procedures, good systems and protocols, the real challenge isn't the absence of the rules, it's the real gap between what we call workers imagined and workers actually done and under real life operational conditions. And again reflecting back on high risk environments, on paper organisations may have very strong systems, However, if the systems are difficult to apply operationally, if they really disconnect from reality in terms of frontline activities, or if they're unsupported by leadership behaviors, then the people themselves are going naturally begin to adapt from a shortcut or drift away from working the way against an attended process.

And this is rarely because people themselves are coming in to try and behave unsafely or to take shortcuts. Most often people just trying to get the job done as efficiently as possible within the pressures and constraints they're operating under. And that's why I think the data input is extremely important. It tells us that organisations can't solve behavioural gaps simply by adding more procedures, more rules or more training.

In fact, sometimes we over complex systems, you can unintentionally widen the disconnect that exists between required protocol and reality.

So what are the most successful organisations doing here?

Well thanks James, I'm glad that you've asked me to share that. The organisations I'm seeing making the strongest progress are usually those that are focusing more on human performance, again leadership visibility, operational learning and psychological safety. They're the ones that are asking the questions like what are the real pressures are people working under? And what procedures do we have? And why are they difficult to follow operationally?

And what workarounds do we have that are being normalized?

How can we actually identify these shortcuts and do something about them?

Really important to me, being people centred in my approach is do people really feel safe to speak up when the systems themselves don't feel reality?

Because if people are afraid to challenge unsafe conditions, or if operational pressures consistently overrides protocol, then even the best written systems will eventually weaken in practice. So from my own experience, the organisations that close this protocol behaviour gap most effectively are the ones where these leaders are highly visible, operational conversations are timely, open and honest, and frontline teams are actually involved in shaping exactly how work's done and the practicality of applying it. Ultimately the safety systems only become effective when they align with what we see as operational reality.

Thanks Hugh. So with that protocol practice gap in mind, let's look at the data on incident rates. And the number I really want to focus on here is that fifty three percent of workplace safety incidents result in lost time. That's really telling, isn't it Hugh?

James, it certainly is, and again one of the most important and possibly the most revealing findings that comes out of the report. When we've got over half of workplace accidents resulting in lost time, despite all the effort organisations believe they're making to make sure they're well equipped, it tells us something important that the capability of the organisation on paper does not always translate to operational resilience and practice. So most organisations, as I said we know, have got strong procedures, systems, permits, trained equipment, but these incidents rarely happen because a procedure didn't exist.

The reason they tend to occur is usually because of operational pressures, human factors, or real world real life working conditions which influence behaviour and decision making in ways that organisations don't always fully understand or recognise.

So in all work environments people are constantly trying to balance competing priorities, whether it's production pressure, time constraints, fatigue, changes in the environment, interface of contractors, or resort limitations.

The pressures shape the behaviors of people every single day and what really concerns me most is the fact that organizations still underestimate how quickly any deviation can become normalized and it can develop under constant pressure. Small courts, shortcuts, adaptations or workarounds gradually become accepted ways of working until eventually the system drifts that way and drifts away from the unintended control which can result in an accident or a serious incident. So from my own experience, the organisations that manage to reduce the serious incidents most effectively aren't usually the ones with the biggest procedure manuals, but we're the ones where strong frontline safety leadership visibility, high workforce trust and open operation communication become the norm for them.

Because when people feel confident to challenge unsafe conditions early, they raise concerns openly and stop work when needed, this is when we can identify the risks much earlier and longer before they can escalate into something much more serious in terms of harm or lost time events.

Thanks Hugh. So what's interesting is that seventy five percent of organisations consider themselves very well equipped to handle incidents.

What do you think that tells us?

Well really James, I think the data here reflects an important maturity challenge that again faces organisations, not just in the UK, in the Americas, in Canada, but globally. Many organisations are well equipped in terms of their actual technical or compliance perspective. However, they've got the robust procedures, advanced systems, modern PPE, strong technology platforms and extensive training programs. What's lacking though, when it comes to operational safety, it's ultimately delivered through this people interaction with those systems in real working conditions, and unfortunately this is where the gaps begin to emerge.

We recognize that risk is dynamic. Conditions change, fatigue accumulates, communication can break down, we have contractors coming in coming out rotating, and production pressures can vary and increase. And this is when your supervisors become stretched, and under those conditions even the strongest of systems can weaken operationally if organisations are not actively monitoring how work is actually being performed on a regular basis.

Yes, absolutely in terms of contractors. They'll be dealing with unfamiliar work sites, less direct oversight, we see this too.

Well I think contractors are becoming more and more involved and important in many industries, and across industries globally we find that contractors are frequently exposed to higher levels of operational uncertainty and what I call interface risk. They're entering unfamiliar sites, working with different procedures, different rules, different leadership expectations, different permit systems, and changing teams, And often, this is why they're trying to establish credibility and deliver the work both quickly and safely. And unfortunately, this can sometimes create environments where people feel less confident to stop work, less confident to speak up, less confident to challenge unsafe conditions or admit uncertainty. So this is why today contractor management must go much further than just onboarding compliance checks.

So this one's interesting.

We've heard that zero incident targets are widely seen as unrealistic, and yet many organisations are still using these goals because they're easy to promote and measure.

But it's also very likely leading to under reporting, so those incident rates we just looked at are probably higher than organisations are aware of.

It becomes one of those things where you don't know what you don't know.

If you can't see what's actually happening on your site, how can you prevent it from happening again, or more seriously next time?

Hugh, what's your stance on this?

Well James, think this is one of the most important conversations currently being held in the safety profession internationally at the moment. Whilst the intention behind zero incident goals is a real positive, in reality if the organisation is not careful, these targets can actually unintentionally create some fear or silence and reduce organisational learning opportunities. The problem is not the aspiration. Every organisation wants people to go home safely and nobody wants harm to occur to any of their people or premises. The issue arises when zero becomes interpreted operationally as 'nothing bad must ever be reported', and unfortunately that seems to be the case in many environments.

And once people start believing reporting accidents near misses operational concerns have a negative effect on the performance metrics, on the reputation, or on management's perception of how well they're doing work, then this is when the organisations begin to lose availability of what's really happening day to day in the field, and this is where risk becomes extremely dangerous. The serious incidents rarely emerge without warning signs beforehand, whilst the warning signs may be weak at first, a small deviation, a minor near miss, operational frustration shortcuts or a slight communication breakdown or normal normal, normalized workaround. If the organisation suppress or fail to surface these weak signals early, then they remove one of the most important opportunities for them to actually learn and prevent escalation.

So Hugh, what does good practice look like in this scenario?

Well James, in my experience really the safety, some strongest safety cultures aren't necessarily those that report the fewest events. More often the strongest organisations are those that curate and encourage higher levels of reporting, complete openness and operational honesty with a no punishment approach. Mature organisations understand that reporting is not a failure, it's visibility, an opportunity to react, an opportunity to prevent things escalating or happening again. And such visibility allows organisations to learn, to adapt, and to strengthen what controls they have in place before serious harm occurs.

This is one of the big positives to me from the actual BlackLine Safety report. It really enforces an important leadership challenge. If leadership only celebrate low incident numbers, people naturally begin protecting the metric, rather than actually protecting the people in the operation.

That's why there's an increasing focus globally on lead indicators and organisational learning rather than just purely the lagging statistics as was historically the actual approach.

Okay, so what would some examples of leading indicators be?

Well from my experience James, and I must be honest with you, things like are people speaking up early? Are supervisors having meaningful conversations with all the workers and contractors?

Are hazards being identified correctly and quickly? Are operational pressures being openly discussed with the people they impact upon? And are near misses being investigated properly and timely?

And ultimately do workers generally feel psychologically safe to challenge these unsafe conditions? Not just workers but contractors as well. These are often far stronger indicators of a positive organisational health than the industry in their injury stats alone, and I prefer the concept of thriving towards zero harm whilst recognising operational reality because high risk industries always involve uncertainty, they always involve changing conditions and human decision making under great pressure. So mature organisations realise that reality and focus on building resilient systems, trusted leadership and continuous learning. Not creating cultures where people feel under pressure to appear perfect are the ones that work best. So ultimately organisations improve safety most effectively when people feel safe to tell the truth about the work is actually being done, not just how the system expects the work to be done James.

So how can organisations level up their safety programmes?

There are three pillars that make up strong safety culture: training and communication, tools and technology, and data and reporting.

Most organizations have all three, but few have them working together.

As we know, the intent and the budget are both there. That's not the issue. It's that each pillar tends to operate on its own, which means gaps persist even when investment increases.

A neomist logged in one system might never make it into the next training cycle. Protocols get updated without the frontline knowing why.

When these pillars inform each other in real time, the whole system gets smarter.

Connection prevents information being siloed and is what separates a safety program from a safety culture.

Yes James, far too often training, reporting, operational learning, leadership engagement and technology all appear to operate in silos rather than being one big integrated learning system. And when that happens, organisations can unintentionally create fragmented safety programmes where information itself exists, but true insight is lost.

Okay, so how can organisations build a strong safety culture?

Well I think, again banging the drum about safety culture, it's very much built through trust engagement, quality communication and consistency of leadership. And at the centre of the three pillars that you quite rightly discussed here is the P word people. It's the people who interpret the procedures, it's the people who respond and react to pressure, it's the people who adapt the systems in real operational environments, and it's the people who decide when to speak up or whether to stay silent. And people ultimately determine whether organisations actually learn or drift. That's why the human element is and remains so critical, because safety culture is not something created by a policy document. It's created by what we do, how we do it every day through the quality of conversations, the leadership visibility and the trust that people feel and the organisation's willingness to learn from what is actually happening in the field and responding timely.

So ultimately the organisations that perform best are usually those where training, communication, technology and operational learning are all connected into one continuously adapting system with people at its heart.

Yes, Shant.

So when we looked at the training piece of this system, we learned that investment alone doesn't build culture, and most safety training still runs in one direction from the top down.

Nearly a third of leaders see better training as a path to greater trust among workers, but the question is, what does better training look like?

I'm thinking it doesn't necessarily mean more training requiring even more investment, but more data driven training that reflects real site conditions and real worker experiences.

What does better training mean to you Hugh?

A good and strong question there James. Better training doesn't necessarily result from more training as you said. In many organisations today, our people are already overloaded with information, procedures and mandatory learning requirements. The real challenge now is whether the training genuinely connects with this operational reality, and whether or not it influences behaviour when it matters most at the sharp end in the field, when people are under pressure, and during day to day timely decision making. So better training to me means more operationally relevant, more human centred, and far more connected to how work is actually performed.

Too much traditional training focuses on transferring information rather than building a more in-depth understanding, creating this engagement and enabling practical decision making capabilities of our people at all levels. People don't learn effectively, effectively simply by being shown these slides or repeated procedures. They learn when the training they're actually being given reflects the realities they face every day. And as I mentioned before, this includes production pressure fatigue, changing conditions, contracts interfaces, time or operational challenges. So from my experience from offshore operations, manufacturing and complex industrial environments internationally, the most effective training is usually highly practical, decision based sorry, discussion based, and grounded in real operational learning for the people who are actually having to do the task on a day in day out basis.

Thanks Hugh. So what kind of discussions should companies be having?

Well I think the really important thing is James that we have conversations with the people about the tasks. What actually makes this task difficult? Where do the procedures become harder to follow and why? And what shortcuts or workarounds are becoming normalised? Again and why?

What pressures influence your decision making when you have to make tough decisions? And really importantly, why should somebody stop speaking up? They're all incredibly valuable questions that can give us a great insight into how to work smarter not harder. And I also think this is a very important shift that's happening globally, particularly around the role of frontline workers in respect to training.

Because frontline teams often understand the operational risks much better than anybody else, and if the company is actively involved in shaping the training content in sharing their operational experiences, and identifying where systems may not reflect real working conditions, then this is strong effective training. Another critical point for me is better training should strengthen the judgements that they make, not just rule recall as I call it. In high risk environments in particular, people constantly encounter situations where procedures alone can't fully predict some of the decisions they have to make, and that means organisations need workers who can recognise these weak signals, adapt safely, communicate openly and make really good decisions particularly when under pressure.

And finally I think effective training must operate as part of an ongoing continuous learning loop informed by real incidents, near misses observations, operational data and regular workforce feedback.

So when it comes to the tools and technology workers are using, trust is not automatic. We see a general sense of trust, but not a great deal of trust.

What we heard in the in-depth interviews during this study is that adoption increases when the purpose of the tool is clear and the worker can see directly how it protects them.

Without that context, the tool becomes just another procedure to work around.

Cost is always a factor, but the data shows workers are also pushing back on tools that feel intrusive, adding to an already heavy equipment load or just don't work reliably in the field. The answer isn't a cheap tool, it's a better one.

And then it's solid training and implementation that helps teams understand the value of the tool or the tech, not just the rules around using them.

Anything else you would add Hugh?

Well I think this is a really significant finding Jane, because in reality people only trust and consistently use technology if they really genuinely feel and believe it supports them operationally. From my experience frontline workers are usually very quick to determine whether such tools genuinely help them manage risk, or whether it simply creates an additional burden, a distraction, or an oversight pressure that they could do without. If technology is difficult to use or if it generates excessive alarms, it interrupts their workflow unnecessarily, or appears to disconnect from operational reality, people are naturally going find their way to work around it. And once these workarounds become normalised, the organisations can unintentionally create a false sense of security where the leaders themselves believe the risk is being controlled well because the technology exists, whilst in reality frontline behaviours are quietly adapting around it.

And I also think the report touches on something really important regarding trust and perception. Workers need to understand not only how it all works, but why it really matters. If people believe technology is primarily being used to monitor their productivity or to enforce compliance, you can actually weaken or destroy trust very quickly. But when the workers themselves see that the actual technology is there to protect them, to support them and their decision making, to improve communication or to enable faster emergency response, this is when the adoption becomes far stronger and far more timely.

And this is especially important to me for high risk and contract heavy environments where these operational conditions are constantly changing. So for example in the offshore and marine operations, the technology we use must remain reliable in some really demanding extremes such as difficult weather, harsh environments, noisy conditions or dynamic work situations. Because if systems fail at critical moments or become over complicated, workforce confidence can really deteriorate quickly. And this is why effective implementation is absolutely critical James.

Could you explain that further please?

Well certainly James, yeah. The stronger organisations really involve frontline workers during the early selection and options in terms of what technology is available to them. You involve them in the testing and the rollout. They seek the operational feedback, they adopt the system they adapt the systems based on real use conditions and needs, and they ensure that the training given is practical and scenario based rather than purely in the classroom or procedural. Because ultimately the technology should support human performance and not complicate it.

So when the organization can get this balance right, technology itself becomes not just a powerful tool, but a genuine enabler rather than just another system that people feel is being placed on them in order for to comply with.

So now let's look at the final pillar, data and reporting.

This is something we do get excited about because most organizations are sitting on really valuable data.

Most data analysis involves looking back on what's already happened.

Leaders are looking at lagging indicators, but not leading indicators.

Only about one third of leaders are spending time on predictive analytics that have the potential to forecast and prevent injuries.

They're sitting on valuable data from the spectrum of tools and procedures they're investing in without fully leveraging that data for proactive risk prevention.

I think we're going to see a big shift in how organisations utilise their data. What do you think Hugh?

Very much so James. This is undoubtedly one of the biggest opportunities currently facing the safety profession around the world. Most organisations today generate enormous amounts of operational behavioural exposure data, often from connected technologies, reporting systems, permits, observations, inspections, and other frontline activities. However, in reality, in that it's it's that many organizations are still primarily using this data reactively to explain what's already gone wrong, rather than trying to adopt it to identify where risk is building over time and in real time.

So traditional organisations have focused heavily again on these lagging indicators injury rates, recordables, investigations and what trends are there historically. Whilst those measures are still important to the business, they only tell us what's already failed in terms of the systems. What I see now is that real value lies in our predictive capabilities and the operational transparency and visibility. Can we identify weak signals much earlier?

Can we recognise any exposure pattern sooner? And can we detect any drift, fatigue, overload or deteriorating conditions before they actually contribute to a loss or serious harm situation. And this to me is where organisations are increasingly beginning to move from this reactive safety management mindset towards much more proactive risk intelligence in terms of their approach. And some of the most important warning signs often appear long before an incident occurs.

For example, there may be increasing public conflicts, communication breakdowns or fatigue trends. And individually whilst these appear insignificant, organisations when they begin connecting these signals together, they'll see patterns emerging that can provide a really important insight in terms of predictability and in terms of how the work can actually be better controlled. And this is where connected working technology and real time operational data can become truly transformational when it's implemented correctly.

Yes, we see that when organisations have continuous visibility of exposure patterns and real time alerts, risk exposure is significantly reduced.

Very much so James, and it's because they can intervene earlier, can improve people's awareness, and they can give better support when it comes to operational decision making in real time. So the future of safety is not simply collecting more data, but it's turning meaningful data into operational intelligence that frontline teams, supervisors and leaders have access to and can act upon in real time.

AI is, all around us in twenty twenty six and safety is no exception.

When asked what they expect to be the biggest area of growth and innovation in safety over the next two years, the number one answer among leaders was AI and specifically AI playing a role in data and risk analysis.

Sixty five percent expect integrated AI tools that predict risk to become more prominent and you can see that there's a decent amount of trust for AI to do that. Do you see this with your clients here?

Absolutely, James. And to be honest with you, this truly excites me as an opportunity. We're already seeing AI begin to reshape how organizations identify, how they understand and manage operational risk, particularly where we have large volumes of complex data being generated every day. From my perspective, one of the greatest opportunities that AI is presenting to us is its ability to help organisations move from this reactive analysis towards a much more proactive and predictive risk management approach, as we've been discussing earlier. So most organisations today already sit on huge amounts of information, as I said from instant reports all the way through to exposure data. The challenge has often been that humans simply cannot analyse all of the interactions or patterns or weak signals quickly enough.

AI changes that. It can help organisations detect operational drift earlier as we said, and recognise repeated exposure conditions, identify if controls are deteriorating, and support much faster and timely decision making which aligns strongly with where the profession's heading globally. And I strongly believe that AI must support human judgment, not replace it, because safety is ultimately still about people, about the operational context, about human decision making under pressure, and AI cannot fully understand the likes of culture, behavior, trust, leadership behavior, workforce confidence, or the realities of work has actually performed in dynamic operational environments.

So from my perspective, I don't see AI replacing safety professionals or operational leaders. I see it as augmenting them, and I believe trust and governance will become critically important as our AI adoption increases.

So really, organisations need to ensure that the AI tools they employ, deploy are transparent, are operationally credible, and they're clearly understood by the workforce using them. If people don't understand how decisions are being generated, or if the AI is being perceived as surveillance rather than support, this is where the trust can weaken very quickly.

Yeah agreed. Technology alone will never create a strong safety culture, however when AI is properly integrated into operational learning and decision making it has the potential to significantly strengthen visibility, prediction capability and organisational resilience across workplaces, especially high risk environments.

Well, thank you everybody for joining us today.

And thank you once again to James. We've got through quite a few very deep points that come out of the report. Big thanks to Kelly and the wider BlackLine safety team, and in particular HSM for creating this environment and this opportunity to have such an important and timely discussion.

From today, really, of the strongest messages for me is that organisations genuinely care about safety, and they're continuing to invest heavily in improving it. So the intent is very clear, and that for me is extremely encouraging. However, as report highlights, investment alone won't automatically guarantee stronger outcomes.

Across industries globally, organizations are still facing challenges around the all organ operational drift, engagement to workforce, reporting culture, behavioural inconsistencies, managing contractors, leadership visibility, and this gap I keep reinforcing about work is imagined against work actually done. But what we're seeing now is an important evolution in how safety is understood. Safety is no longer viewed as simply being a compliance requirement or an injury prevention activity. Increasingly it's recognised as a key driver for organisational and operational resilience, creating the workforce trust, developing organisation maturity, and therefore increasing sustainable business performance.

And the organisations making the greatest progress aren't necessarily the ones with the lowest reporting numbers as we said. They're often the organisations with the strongest culture of openness, learning trust, adaptability and operational visibility. So today's discussion for me has reinforced something I've consistently seen throughout my career across high risk industries globally, with high performance, and safety is ultimately about people. Because people make the decisions, people manage the pressure, and it's the people who adapt to changing organisational operational realities.

And it's the leaders creating these environments where people feel safe to speak up, to learn and to contribute openly, and they've got a really important role to play moving forward. And the organisation that will succeed in the years ahead will be those that can successively combine the technology, the data and innovation with strong human centered leadership, psychological safety and genuine operational learning. And what I particularly value about the report is it provides organisations with a really honest opportunity to reflect, to take a look at themselves and ask themselves where are we today, to identify what gaps still exist and decide what actions are needed both to strengthen the safety culture and operational performance as they move forward.

And the real value to me now comes what happens next, from continuing the conversations, from turning this insight into real action, and from improving communication, leadership visibility, learning capability, and risk understanding across all levels of every organisation.

Because every improvement in these areas ultimately protects the people, which in turn strengthens the organisation and improves their ongoing resilience and the sustainability of work itself. So I sincerely hope that today's webinar is not seen at the end of a conversation, but it's part of a much wider ongoing discussion across industries about how we continue building safer, smarter and more resilient workplaces together. So once again thank you for your time, engagement and contributions today. A massive thanks to Black Lives Safety for inviting me to be part of this conversation.

Yeah, and thank you again very much you for your contribution and insights today.

The full keeping people safe report is a robust look at all this data and more with insights from the oil and gas, manufacturing, utilities, fire and hazmat, petrochemical and transport industries.

Scan the QR code on the screen here to download the full report or visit the BlackLine Safety website to get access to data on staff versus contractor compliance, the most frequently used safety tools and procedures, common barriers to wearable tech, six real world actions you can take today to move from a compliance only culture to a true safety culture, and much more.

Thanks very much for listening everyone and, we're happy now to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you very much guys. That's been a great discussion. I'm glad you've got that QR code up because lots of people were asking how to get a copy of the report. So please, if you haven't already done so, get your phone out, take a snap of the QR code and you can download the report. Lots of questions have been coming in. Keep your questions coming. First question I'm going to ask is one for Hugh and it's from Robert and he's saying, are you saying zero incident goals are a bad idea?

Not at all. That should be the ultimate aspiration of every each and every organisation whether small, whether large. The problem is nobody wants to be the one that reports the bad news. Sometimes people think the fact that we're trying to strive towards a zero accident culture means that we shouldn't report little things because it may reflect badly on ourselves or on our part of the business. Whereas ultimately the more we can report, the more we can respond and react to, particularly using some of the tools and methodologies that's coming out of the report, encourages us to actually drive down in reality zero harm. So it's more about zero harm which is actually achieved by actually reacting responding to small things before they escalate to become much bigger issues.

Thank you, okay good point. Next question from Antonia, why do workers resist safety tools even when they're there to help?' And that's one for you James.

Okay, thank you.

So we find that much of this comes down to change management. It's natural that people resist adopting something new, especially if it adds complexity, or they need to learn how to use it. However, what we see is that adoption really improves when workers understand the why. They clearly see this helps me go home safe. So managing change, managing the communications around changes really key in any technology implementation.

Thank you very much. Keep your questions coming in. We've got some great ones to ask.

This next question is from Clive. What should we be measuring instead of just incidents? And that's over to you, Hugh.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, it's about active engagement. It's about what I call VFL, visible felt leadership.

Are people getting involved in conversations? Are we having quality conversations? Are small things being reported and reacted and responded to on a timely basis? A lot more things in terms of prevention rather than the historic approach which is really reaction. So really engagement, conversations held, how many points are being raised, how many things were actually improving before we're waiting for a loss event. Lots of little things like that can make such a significant difference in terms of prevention rather than having to put something right after it's gone wrong.

Thank you very much. Okay, next question.

Do you have any examples of where predictive data actually reduces risk? And I think that's one for you, James.

Thank you.

Yeah, we see this a lot, not surprisingly.

We've done some work with a leading waste management company in the UK who uses BlackLine's devices for gas detection and loan worker safety at its landfill sites, and they look at the data that the devices collect, monitor methane gas hazard levels across their sites, and that gives them access to both real time and historical data, which they use not just to identify and respond to immediate threats on the work site, but also to uncover trends such as where and when gas exposure threats have been present in certain timeframe. And using this approach, what they've been able to do is not just make continual adjustments to day to day operations, but also larger changes to their work practices to prevent issues that were bubbling up from perhaps becoming more significant.

Thank you very much. Okay, another question's coming from John. Where do you see AI adding the most value in safety? And that's for you Hugh.

Well I think it's very much based on the organisational needs and the organisational assessment because AI itself offers so many different solutions in such a wide birth of environments.

James just mentioned the actual use of the methane monitoring in a landfill waste site and automatically flashed back to me I've had to deal with far too many fatalities in workplaces around the world. One of those was actually a multiple facility in a steel plant where one of our customers in South Korea actually had five fatalities because the actual detection system of the monitoring wasn't predictive. They actually went into a vessel where the oxygen had been purged from and because one person went down it was a chain reaction, people went in to try to get their friend and all five of them died sadly through asphyxiation in there.

Now to me it's about assessing your own environment, identifying where the greatest hazards are. If they'd had this predictive technology that changes shared to the methane, we could have saved this loss of life. Always think it's a tragedy that people never take a look at their own reality and say what's in it for me, what's the maximum value I can get in this technology? We see what's available on the sites, but working with people like BlackLine who have such a host of experience in different environments and different industries, there's so many solutions out there that may be relevant.

So people should be talking with these companies, with these suppliers to make sure they have the best solution for their needs.

Thank you very much. Now keep your questions coming in. Any that we don't get time to ask online I would definitely be sending over to the team at BlackLine. This is coming from Mark and Mark works within high risk marine and offshore operations. So he's particularly interested in the relationship between operational reality, organisational drift and how culture data reflects what's actually happening in the field. Have you got any comments on that?

Is that more for myself or for James?

It's one for you, Hugh. Has Sorry.

To be quite honest with you, I think particularly in the environment that Mark's working in, the important thing is, and know it himself, and I think I know Marcus as well, he's a very respected colleague I know from this industry, who's actually based out in the Middle East. He's worked in Oman for a few years. In this environment, you don't have the option of getting it wrong twice.

So the important thing is any form of drift needs to be identified. This is where we really need this open reporting culture. This is where we need engagement and visible leadership. Because if you're on a, say an oil and gas platform in the middle of a sea somewhere, you get it wrong once and the actual impact is absolutely massive and can mean multiple fatalities.

So any form of drift as early as possible should be flanked, should be raised. A big part again is that worker engagement. When we actually develop the controls, we develop the procedures, we need to ensure that the people actually using those procedures are part of the actual process in terms of developing the solutions and the right controls, because ultimately they have to own the controls and particularly if it's in a condition where we deviate from the norm. So in these industries, in nuclear industries, in the high risk industries, mining, offshore, it's really important that any deviation is flagged straight away.

We build that trust, we have that engagement so that people will speak up if it's not right or it's not working, so we can respond sooner. Because if we don't speak up early enough, this is what creates the drift.

Probably again this is one of the challenges where you have multicultural workforces and sometimes language barriers.

So it can be a real additional burden to try and overcome some of these things to get people to speak up.

Thank you very much. Okay, I think we've got time for one more question. This is coming from Mohamed. What role does employee participation play in shaping a strong safety culture and how can it be measured? And he's asked that of you.

Well I'm glad you've asked me that, it's a good one because ultimately safety culture is the way we do things here and safety culture is developed by the people, with the people, for the people, how the people do it.

So the important thing is everybody has got to be involved in the actual organisation itself. Now you don't get a world class safety culture overnight. There's a lot of tools and techniques out there and I've been involved in doing a lot of safety cultural assessments in places such as India, Middle East, Europe, Australia, Canada, China and there are tools out there where we can actually assess the level of safety maturity based on the questions we ask. So I would say initially do some form of reputable assessment which gets the actual inputs of people at all levels of the organisation including contractors to give yourself a baseline as to where you are.

Because you'll be amazed in reality our option, often the perception of management, supervisors, contractors in the workforce misaligns. This tells us there's a disconnect in culture, in terms of values, in terms of actual aspirations. That type of initial baseline assessment gives us a lot to decide these are the areas we've got gaps, and these are the priorities where our risks actually expose our people to harm, but we should focus on first.

Thank you very much. Okay, well that's all we've got time for today. Lots of you have been asking about slides and whether slides can be sent to you. We won't be sending out slides after this event, but you can rewatch this webinar on demand. You can rewatch all of our webinars on ignitecpd dot com. You can also do a key search in that platform so you can get up all of BlackLine Safety's previous webinars and watch those. So please do check it out.

And a huge thank you to everyone who's asked a question today and to everyone who's watched this. It's been great to have you today. And a huge thank you to both of my presenters, James and Hugh. It's been a fantastic discussion and I do appreciate their time and their knowledge.

Also, thank you to BlackLine Safety for sponsoring this event. Without their support, we could not put this free content on for you. So please do get in touch with them and don't forget to download the report. One other thing you mustn't forget is to download your CPD certificate.

You can download it on this platform. There's an icon on this page.

If you have any problems, do reach out to me and I will be sure to help you.

And we will now redirect you to an upcoming webinar with HSI Donesafe entitled Connected Insight for Safety Work. So make sure you register to attend, and I look forward to seeing you then. Thanks.