Beyond Compliance: Navigating Deregulation and Redefining Workplace Safety

As regulatory oversight shifts, the private sector, professional associations and government agencies must come together to build a more resilient and proactive culture of workplace safety.

• By Scott DeBow
• Sep 08, 2025

Workplace safety is once again capturing national attention. Following a series of recent congressional hearings debating the scope and future of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s (OSHA) regulatory authority, safety has reemerged as a signal amidst the noise for lawmakers, labor advocates and business leaders alike. These debates go beyond political theater—they signal a deeper shift in how the country defines and delivers its duty of care for workers across industries.

Even as questions around federal oversight evolve, one fact remains unchanged: The responsibility to protect workers endures whether we are in an environment of increasing or decreasing regulation. And this responsibility has become more complex—employers are now operating in a fragmented safety landscape where guidance is fluid, standards vary and accountability increasingly rests with individual organizations.

To me, this isn’t just a challenge, though—it’s an opportunity. Rather than viewing deregulation as a void, forward-thinking companies, associations and agencies can use this as bridge-building, with contemporary constructs serving to modernize the needs that those three pillars all agree on: Fewer fatalities, fewer injuries and better business. The central question becomes: How can we collaboratively raise the bar for worker protection regardless of if we are in an increasingly or decreasingly centralized environment?

Could the answer lie aligning private sector leadership, professional industry and consensus standards organizations—such as the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP)—and public resources to create a high-impact safety ecosystem? Many safety professionals, myself included, have been thinking about this for a while. Now, with momentum in this direction building, the time is ripe to take action.

The Private Sector: Moving Beyond Minimal Compliance

For decades, many companies treated safety as a compliance exercise—checking boxes, passing audits and reacting to external mandates. But today’s reality demands a shift in mindset, as suggested by the Harvard Business Review. Leading businesses are finding improvement lives beyond the traditional “compliance only” frameworks, with safety being viewed as a vital activity and driven as a strategic imperative for improving business performance.

Many of these organizations are finding these strategic connections and safety creation activities through embracing structured continuous improvement models like the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. Rooted in quality management principles and included in consensus standards such as ISO 45001 and ANSI/ASSP Z10, PDCA offers a flexible yet disciplined approach to better connect all stakeholders in driving a process of safety excellence. Of particular note, at the center of the PDCA model for ISO 45001 is “Leader/Worker Participation” at each of the stages in the cycle.

Here’s a quick overview of the PDCA process:

• Plan: Identify strengths, weaknesses and objectives. Establish risk-based activities and metrics designed to monitor and assess risk. Prioritize fatal/catastrophic risk and associated mitigations and safeguards.
• Do: Implement planned safety initiatives, such as training, leader/worker engagements, risk assessments or perception surveys. Leading organizations prioritize “Do” activities as it relates to serious injury and fatality (SIF) prevention, such as ensuring reliability of safeguards designed to prevent the release of lethal energy.
• Check: Monitor results, audit performance and analyze outcomes. Ask: “How did we do?” and “What did we learn?” Prioritize organizational learning—not punitive measures—and forward feed success and opportunities to the next stage.
• Act: Adjust strategies based on findings and embed successful practices into standard operations. Leader/worker participation, while critical at every stage, must be prioritized during the “Act” stage to continually strengthen the cycle.

You can see how methodically working through each stage of this model empowers organizations to assess risk and set a deliberate, repeatable path toward improvement.

The goal isn’t perfection—it’s sustainable progress, which is a big reason empowering frontline employees throughout the PDCA process is not only a critical shift toward calibrating leadership teams to the risks they actually experience, but for worker engagement as a whole. For instance, according to the Gallup Q12 Poll, workers that are highly engaged achieve 14% higher levels of productivity, 70% higher levels of wellbeing and 63% fewer accidents. 

While engagement factors are critical to what we do, safety metrics are connected to how we’re doing. The “Do” stage of the PDCA model is the prime opportunity to engage in the process of measuring “Are we good?” or “Are we just lucky?” As the nature of risk means that a work environment can often be very unsafe, and yet often nothing happens—we get lucky—it’s imperative to capture the “safety creation activities” of what we “Do” in order to create those safe environments.

Instead of focusing solely on lagging indicators like injury rates, organizations are now paying attention to how people interact with systems, tools and environments. Starting with first principle of human and organizational performance that error is inevitable, organizations can design more resilient and forgiving processes built to prevent mistakes from turning into harm, and turning their thinking toward “How are we together anticipating error?”

Ultimately, in the absence of rigid external mandates, supply chain risk management technologies and internal leadership become defining factors. Addressing error in our work systems before risk becomes unacceptable now becomes an organizational value, and safety must be championed at the executive level. Embedding safety throughout an organization and its operations is what drives lasting cultural change, especially as corporate safety evolves from compliance frameworks to performance frameworks.

The Role of Professional Associations: Guiding Through Uncertainty

When regulatory waters are murky, professional associations, such as the ASSP, serve as secretariat for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) consensus standards specific to injury and fatality prevention in the workplace. This association serves as a beacon of trusted guidance, offering companies a framework for addressing safety performance through a systems approach, often addressing areas the regulatory community is silent on or unable to keep pace with.

Standards developed by groups like the ASSP and ANSI often exceed government mandates in rigor and specificity, with the regulators often referencing these standards themselves when needed. Though voluntary, consensus standards offer structured, field-tested frameworks that enable organizations to build stronger, more proactive safety programs.

Perhaps most importantly, associations bridge the gap between thought leadership and ground-level reality. With close alliance and affiliation with OSHA, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the US Army Corps of Engineers and others, they translate complex challenges into actionable guidance and serve as trusted advisors for elevating the standard of care across entire sectors.

The Role of Government Agencies: Needed Partners, Not Just a Policymaker

Even as regulatory authority evolves, government agencies like OSHA remain essential contributors to the national safety conversation. It serves us well to remember the 14,000 workplace fatalities that occurred in 1970, the year before OSHA was established. That equated to 17 deaths per 100,000 workers in a workforce of just under 83 million. The fatality rate today is much improved: In 2023, there were 5,283 workplace fatalities at a rate of 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers in a workforce almost double the size it was in 1970.

However, we’ve hit a plateau—the fatality rate has not improved in two decades—and let’s not forget that there are still 15 preventable worker fatalities every day. All that despite the addition of approximately 10-12 new regulations per decade in the 50 years since OSHA’s founding. I’m in no way faulting the very hard-working, undersized agency. However, there’s a clear indication that while important, compliance has limitations, especially considering the fatality rates. 

Deepening collaboration between the regulator, businesses and industry associations is a powerful opportunity for alignment, especially in complex environments like joint-employer arrangements or multi-contractor projects. Aligning guidance with operational realities ensures that safety policies don’t just exist on paper—they work in practice.

By remaining engaged, adaptable and collaborative, government agencies can play a constructive role in shaping the future of workplace safety—one that provides the plumbline to measure up to (compliance) alongside structured accountability and innovation.

The Power of Three: A Blueprint for Collaboration, Innovation and Resilience

It’s been thrilling to see the strategic public-private partnership between Space X and NASA. This blend of government oversight and private sector funding and innovation has led to some incredible advances in aerospace capability and scale. Milestones such as Space X’s dozens of missions to resupply the International Space Station have proven the incredible value of rapid development innovation cycles for reusable, cost effective launch vehicles. Of course, it would not have been achievable without NASA’s decades of scientific research, safety protocols and mission oversight. And rounding out this powerhouse of innovation are industry associations such as the Aerospace Industries Association, Commercial Spaceflight Federation and National Space Council.

There seems to be something in this “power of three” model. Each stakeholder group—businesses, agencies and associations—has a unique role, but the most powerful outcomes—whether in aerospace or workplace safety—arise when these entities work in concert. True progress comes not from silos, but from strategic alignment.

Coalitions such as the Intersociety Forum (ISF)—founded jointly by the ASSP and National Safety Council to urge business leaders and policy makers to prioritize safety as a matter of strategy and economic competitiveness through its three guiding principles—are bringing critical groups together to foster commitment and collaboration in improving workplace safety.

One of the most effective models of collaboration is co-developing standards. When regulators bring their policy perspective, associations contribute field expertise and businesses share on-the-ground insight, the result is standards that are both aspirational and applicable, and more clearly focused on evidence-based outcomes.

From my perspective, organizations that have been leading out in going beyond compliance per the ISF’s three guiding principles are achieving not only better business performance but significant reductions in fatality risk and events.

This collaboration provides a shared framework for sustainable safety—one where everyone understands their role, leverages their strengths and commits to collective progress. It’s a system that doesn’t just maintain compliance, it fosters excellence.

Reframing the Future of Safety

Deregulation may reduce some external mandates, but it also reminds us of a deeper truth: Compliance alone is no longer enough, which we’ve known for quite some time. In this evolving landscape, it’s technology and internal leadership, cross-sector collaboration and cultural commitment that will define the next era of workplace safety.

When leadership vision, professional expertise and regulatory alignment converge, the result is not just compliance, it’s transformation. As we consider the societal benefits to addressing longstanding challenges related to preventable fatalities, I would describe this as transformational work with legacy impact.

Could the stars be aligning for mutually beneficial alignment between business, associations and agencies to radically advance the improvement of safety and health? I believe they are. Time to go beyond compliance and lead!

This article originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.