Data to Decisions 2026 Benchmark Report
75% of EHS and ops leaders are not confident that their data would flag the next SIF. See what separates the confident 25% in Novara's 2026 benchmark report.
Executive Summary
The Data Is There. The Decisions Aren’t.
We asked EHS and operations leaders across high-hazard industries how confident they are that their safety data would flag the next serious injury or fatality. Three in four stopped short of very confident. This report is about what separates the group that fully trusts its data from the three in four who didn’t.
75%
are not “very confident” their data would flag the next SIF
53%
say it’s not a data problem — it’s a routing problem
22%
make data-driven decisions weekly or more often
Why We’re Here
The Industry Is Fixing the Wrong Thing
Eight of OSHA’s ten most-cited standards in 2025 were already on the list in 2015. Fall protection has held the #1 spot the entire decade. Same hazards, same order, year after year — and over that same stretch, the U.S. workplace preventable death rate barely moved, from 3.0 to 2.9 per 100,000 workers.
That’s not evidence the industry stopped trying. It’s evidence the industry has gotten very good at recording what already happened, while the signals that come before a serious injury or fatality — SIF precursors — go uncollected, unrouted, and unacted on.
The Decision Gap is Novara’s 2026 benchmark on what’s actually standing between the safety data your program collects and the decisions it should be driving.
Table of Contents
What You’ll Find Inside
- Why Now — why a decade of focus on the OSHA Top 10 hasn’t moved the national fatality rate, and where best-practice guidance is headed instead.
- The Current State — what safety programs report to leadership today, how often they act on it, and how much of the frontline actually feeds the system.
- What Works — the two variables that separate the most confident safety programs from everyone else.
- The Comparison — how Novara customers stack up against the field on every measure in the report.
- The Mechanics — the shift that moves a program from collecting safety data to acting on it.
The RESULTS
A Sample of What the Data Shows
A few findings to start with. The full report has the rest, including how confidence breaks down by decision cadence, frontline participation, and company size.
Forward-looking metrics are more common than the industry sometimes gives itself credit for:
70% report leading indicators and 66% report near misses. But only 26% report SIF precursors, the one metric explicitly designed to identify fatal-risk exposure before it turns into an outcome.
Confidence in SIF prediction climbs with cadence:
35% among programs that rarely act on their data, 87% among those deciding multiple times a week.
Frontline engagement matters:
There’s a 39-point confidence gap between programs where under a quarter of the frontline reports in and programs where more than three-quarters do. Partial participation buys partial confidence — the real gain shows up once reporting is close to universal.
GET YOUR COPY
Get The Decision Gap: 2026 Benchmark
The Decision Gap is written for EHS leaders, operations leaders, and the executives who sign off on safety strategy in high-hazard industries: anyone accountable for the distance between a hazard someone reported and a decision someone made.
See the full breakdown of what separates confident safety programs from the rest — plus how Novara customers compare on every measure in the report.
Fill out the form to receive your copy
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