How connected worker platforms are reshaping manufacturing safety standards

Key takeaways

• A mature safety culture goes beyond compliance, making safety a shared, proactive responsibility across all levels of the organization.
• Connected worker platforms embed safety into daily tasks, enabling real-time training, audits, and instant near-miss reporting.
• Digital tools like mobile checklists and QR-based lessons improve safety compliance, engagement, and operational efficiency.
• Safety data from digital platforms creates a feedback loop, helping identify training gaps and spread best practices across the workforce.

In 2023 there were 326,400 non-fatal injuries at U.S. manufacturing companies. At an average of 67 lost workdays per injury, these injuries collectively cost more than 21 million days of worker productivity. With the industry suffering from a skilled labor shortage and close to 4 million jobs needing to be filled by 2033, an influx of new and younger workers will represent increased safety risk. In fact, 30% of all injuries occur during an employees’ first year. 

Manufacturers therefore need to go beyond safety basics and consider how to foster a workforce-centric, mature safety culture within their organizations. Personal protective equipment should not be the only, or even the main, safety tool on the manufacturing shop floor. Formal training events done during onboarding or once per year as part of compliance training require learners to understand, retain, and recall critical safety information once back at their workstations and when the need arises. Regular audits and reporting are another important pillar of a safety program, but can fail to fully engage workers and achieve their intended objectives. 

Enter technology such as connected worker platforms, capable of ensuring that safety standards and training concepts become part of daily work and that safety becomes a collective responsibility on the factory floor. 

How safe is your organization? The safety maturity curve can reveal the answer

Creating a strong culture around health and safety in the manufacturing industry is key. Unfortunately, many organizations are in the very early stages of maturing their safety culture. Manufacturers can measure how mature their safety culture is with the Bradley Curve of Organizational Safety Maturity, a four phased model that is designed to measure the sophistication of an organization’s health and safety programs, procedures, and workflows.

Early in an organization’s safety maturity journey, the focus is on compliance-based practices and meeting regulations – safety measures are minimal, and responses are primarily related to incidents. By contrast, a mature organization takes a more proactive, preventative approach where there is a collective responsibility. In these companies, safety is a core organizational value integrated into all levels of operations and decision-making. 

Manufacturers need to ensure safety is a core business value by implementing proactive measures, continuous improvement, and employee engagement. Although a strong safety culture requires strong leadership, it is important to avoid taking a top-down mentality where safety measures are imposed, and near-misses are punished. By empowering employees to take ownership of safety, the right behavior will follow.

Digital tools are here to save the day, and lives

Connected factory worker platforms are fast becoming table stakes in a digital factory. They give frontline workers access to continuous learning, communication, and productivity tools right at their workstations. 

Connected worker apps make it easy to document and centralize safety standards in a visual format that is easy to understand, retain, and access. Once set up, these one-point safety lessons can be easily accessed through a QR code – when and where they’re needed.

Beyond formal training, safety practices should be built into daily work using task checklists. A checklist is a useful job aid for critical tasks like Lock-Out-Tag-Out. Unfortunately, when these checks are done manually on paper, steps are often skipped. Digital checklists are faster to access and complete and give real-time visibility into what’s happening on the factory floor.

Similarly, inspections and audits done on paper are problematic. As team members conduct important safety checks, whether a fire extinguisher inspection or a safety walk, the purpose is to gain insights into safety risks. Data collected manually can only be analysed when it is re-keyed into safety databases – time wasted by safety managers that could certainly be put to better use. 

Near-miss and safety-based observation reporting helps further reveal opportunities to take preventative action. For this reason, management should do everything possible to encourage reporting. Unfortunately, when reporting is done on paper, workers can be less inclined to submit reports because it takes time to find and complete the right form. When near-misses are submitted through a connected worker platform, notifications can be automatically sent out so that action can be taken immediately. The digital audit trail also helps ensure accountability, traceability, and visibility, fostering workforce confidence that the reports they submit are being actioned.

Daily scrums are a great opportunity to remind team members of safety best practices. To complement these in-person moments, digital communication, directly to workers in the news feed of a connected worker app helps to further reinforce a strong safety culture. News posts can include celebration of days without incidents, recognition of a team member reporting a critical risk, or notification that a new safety instruction has been published to address a newly identified risk. 

Learn and repeat – Meet the safety feedback loop 

The value of using a comprehensive connected worker platform to engage workers in safety practices is huge. Integrating safety training delivery, skills tracking, reporting and inspections into a single, worker-centric platform helps maximize adoption and creates a constant feedback loop from which the organization can improve. Workers reporting on safety observations can be used to identify training gaps and priorities. It also facilitates safety best practice sharing across shifts, lines, and sites—vastly expanding valuable safety knowledge across the entire organization at scale.