Beyond Compliance: The Call to Lead
Don’t wait for regulation to catch up to today’s safety realities.
- By David Kopf
- Jun 30, 2025
When it comes to workplace safety, simple compliance doesn’t truly cut it. That was the clear message from my recent conversation with Jennifer McNelly, CAE, CEO of the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP), for the OH&S SafetyPod. (You can hear it in Episode 221.) We talked about the recently released report from the Intersociety Forum (ISF), a coalition of nearly 30 occupational safety, health, and environmental organizations, and how it’s serving as a “call to action” for our industry.
The numbers speak for themselves. For nearly a decade, the number of U.S. workplace fatalities has held steady—more than 5,000 lives lost each year. Meanwhile, OSHA’s Top 10 citations list hardly budges. It’s a sobering reminder that regulatory compliance, on its own, isn’t moving the needle.
McNelly and the ISF believe that safety professionals need to step up and assume the role of strategic leaders within their organizations. That means embracing risk-based safety management systems, industry consensus standards like ISO 45001, and predictive analytics that can identify trouble before it happens. It means seeing safety not as a box to check, but as a business driver—and a moral/ethical imperative.
With today’s fast-changing work environment, high turnover rates, and an evolving workforce, the stakes are higher than ever. That’s why ASSP and its partners are urging OSHA to modernize its approach and recognize the importance of proactive, business-integrated safety strategies.
But here’s the most important part: this shift doesn’t start in Washington—it starts with safety professionals, who can seize the opportunity to lead with foresight, translate data into action, and become the change agents that today’s workplaces need.
As McNelly put it during our conversation, safety is about more than reducing injuries—it’s about strengthening the culture, the innovation, and the resilience of our organizations. And ultimately, it’s about protecting people, families, and futures.
A Special Note of Thanks
Speaking of leadership, I wanted to express my deep thanks to an important safety leader and longtime supporter and friend of Occupational Health & Safety, Robert Pater. As you know, Robert writes the closing Breakthrough Strategies column for each issue, and this edition marks his 200th column!
Robert is a tireless safety advocate who regularly uses his articles as an opportunity to share his insights, experience and expertise on preventing slips/trips/falls and soft tissue injuries, as well as promoting safety culture and fostering safety leadership (there’s that word again). On behalf of the editorial team and the readership, thank you, Robert, and we look forward to you “taking the lead” with many more terrific articles.
This article originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.
About the Author
David Kopf is the publisher and executive editor of Occupational Health & Safety magazine.