The Hidden Crisis in Workplace Safety: Why Confidence Is Up, but Real Protection Isn’t

New research shows most workers feel safe, even as many can’t identify safety systems and remain silent about hazards—highlighting a dangerous gap between perception and protection.

• By Scott DeBow
• Feb 18, 2026

The past several years has brought unprecedented attention to workplace safety. From regulatory updates to high-profile incidents across the construction, manufacturing, and energy sectors, leaders are more aware than ever of the need to protect workers in increasingly complex environments. But recent research suggests that awareness does not necessarily equal impact. In fact, the data points to a troubling disconnect between how safe workers feel and how safe their jobsites are—a gap that represents a growing governance failure across industries.

Despite 79% of workers reporting feeling safe on the job, more than half report that their workplaces lack adequate safety systems. Even more concerning, 17% report they cannot identify a safety system. At first glance, these numbers appear contradictory. How can workers feel confident if the foundational controls are not visible, defined, or consistently applied?

The Blind Spot Putting Workers in Danger

The answer lies in perception, and it’s a perception that’s putting organizations at risk. Workers are increasingly relying on their own assumptions rather than verifiable evidence of the lifesaving safeguards they depend on. Their confidence is not grounded in documented controls, structured processes, or meaningful engagement with safety procedures. Instead, it reflects the belief that because leadership talks about safety more often or because no major incident has occurred recently, the environment must be safe.

68% of workers regularly encounter safety hazards. This statistic alone should serve as a wake-up call. When nearly three-quarters of the workforce recognizes hazards in their daily tasks yet still expresses broad confidence in jobsite safety, our focus must shift to the workforce's risk competencies to respond to and manage those risks. Even more important, it should raise the question of whether the leadership responsible for that workforce is also fully aware of the risks their workers face and has equipped employees with the required risk competency. 

Too often, we see workers inheriting a wide range of risks that, from their perspective, they’re managing as best as they know how, but that the parent organization would deem outside its risk tolerance. It’s important to understand the dynamic at work between how leaders are informed of risk and the actual levels of risk experienced by their workforce. This is what Erik Hollnagel described as Work-as-Imagined (WAI) and Work-as-Done (WAD), highlighting the need for intentional calibration between these two ends of the workforce.

While we see some encouraging statistics, such as 62% of workers reporting increased leadership attention on safety, that leadership attention must translate into tangible responses to work done well, areas needing improvement, and, especially, to unacceptable levels of risk, such as serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs). This is simply good safety leadership. And it’s important that executives see themselves as safety leaders, instilling belief, confidence, and ownership in every interaction. That leadership builds trust and stronger communication about how risk is experienced by those closest to it, so WAI better aligns with WAD, and safety improvements lead to better business outcomes. This is evidenced by the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, which shows that organizations with higher employee engagement experience far fewer workplace injuries.

That brings us to another hard truth that underscores the need for stronger safety leadership: 72% of workers remain silent when they observe unsafe conditions. They do not report hazards. They do not speak up during unsafe acts. Many believe doing so will not lead to change, while others fear repercussions. This could be newer employees with negative past experiences, employees at certain worksites, or it could even be tied to the organization’s incentive and reward systems, such as lower injury rates earning higher bonuses. Regardless, this silence directly undermines safety programs because unreported hazards remain hidden from those responsible for allocating resources and managing their mitigation.  

Effectively Closing the Gap

When leaders lack visibility into the real conditions on the ground, they effectively rely on luck rather than establishing verifiable risk controls. No leadership team would accept relying on luck for financial governance, cybersecurity, or operational continuity. Yet many tolerate it—intentionally or not—when it comes to worker safety.
Fixing this requires leaders to ask themselves and honestly answer: “Are we good or are we just lucky?” Being good, or at least being able to say, “we’re getting better,” means not only that injury rates are down, but that SIF risk has been identified, prioritized, and reduced, and there is strong evidence of measurable collaboration between the leadership and workforce that’s driving those results. Organizations relying solely on incident rate thresholds, without clear evidence of how those results were achieved, should probably consider themselves lucky, not necessarily good, because the nature of risk means there is a distinct difference between the presence of safety and the absence of Injury.

Closing the safety perception gap also requires reframing safety not as a compliance exercise but as a core governance responsibility. Compliance sets the floor, not the ceiling. Businesses must move beyond minimum regulatory requirements and embrace safety as an integrated, measurable, technology-enabled practice.

Systems-based methods built into leading technologies are helping organizations manage risk at the speed of business, such as the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) process. Implementing these risk mitigation tools enables leadership teams to identify hazards in real time by providing a line of sight into the type of work, risk levels, monitoring requirements, and environmental considerations. Unified risk management platforms provide a comprehensive view of risk across the supply chain and consolidate data from multiple contractors, locations, and job types, giving leaders a holistic view rather than fragmented snapshots. In addition, digital reporting systems can streamline how workers communicate concerns, reducing the fear of retaliation and increasing confidence that issues will be addressed.

These systems-based tools do more than improve efficiency—they create transparency. They turn vague perceptions into measurable insights. They allow organizations to track trends, pinpoint high-risk activities, and proactively implement controls before incidents occur. And perhaps most importantly, they give leadership the data needed to validate or challenge worker confidence levels.

Problem Solving for the Future

In short, safety leadership—an intentional, top-down, left-right approach—sets improvement in motion across the entire organization. That leads to better engagement, meaningful two-way communication that strategically aligns with and targets risks managed by the organization and those experienced by the worker. Systems-based tools that integrate processes like PDCA help track and guide improvement across the board.

True safety requires aligning perception with reality. When workers feel safe because they are in control—controls are visible, hazards are addressed quickly, and reporting is encouraged—safety can become a strategic driver of business performance as well as a moral imperative.