What Good Looks Like in Safety Data — and a 90-Day Plan to Close the Gap
When under a quarter of frontline employees are actively engaged in a safety program, only 41% of safety leaders are confident their data would flag the next serious injury or fatality.
But when more than three-quarters report, that number doubles. That’s from the 2026 Decision Gap study, a survey of EHS and operations leaders.
The programs that trust their data aren’t running fancier dashboards. They hear from more of their workforce, and they decide more often. Here’s what that looks like — and a 90-day plan to start getting there.
Two Numbers That Define Good
What Decision Confidence Looks Like
When you sort the benchmark by confidence, two variables separate the top from the bottom.
The first is engagement.
Good means more than 75% of your frontline actively reporting in a typical month. Only 22% of programs are there today.
The gains come in two steps. Getting off the floor is worth real ground — confidence rises from 41% to 56% once more than a quarter of the frontline reports. Then it plateaus through the middle tiers and doesn’t climb again until reporting is close to universal.
Here’s why that matters to you. The middle stalls because reporting there still depends on the crews who happen to be diligent about it. The next jump comes when reporting becomes part of how every crew works — and that takes different moves than getting started did. The plan below covers both.
The second is decision rhythm.
Good means safety data changes an operational decision every week: adding a spotter to a forklift route after three near misses there in one week, re-sequencing a task, pulling a crew off a scaffold until it’s re-inspected. Confidence climbs with every step up, from 35% among programs that rarely act on their data to 87% among those deciding several times a week.
As the report puts it, a quarterly cadence means the average finding waits six weeks for its audience. On a site where crews rotate, six weeks isn’t a reporting delay. It’s a different job site.
You can’t buy confidence. You can move a safety review from quarterly to weekly.
Three Places an Unsatisfactory Safety Platform Breaks
Engagement sounds abstract until you watch it fail. Here’s where reporting stalls in the field — and what crews do instead.
The 14-Field Form on a Phone
Gloves on, truck idling, the next task already waiting. A form built for a desktop doesn’t get finished in the field.
The foreman texts a photo to the safety coordinator, who logs it Friday — if it doesn’t get buried first.
The English-Only Form
On a mostly Spanish-speaking crew, the form only works for the few people who read it easily.
One bilingual worker becomes the crew’s unofficial reporter. Their day off is a reporting blackout nobody notices.
The Contractor Without a Login
Contractors never get an account, so the system can’t hear from some of the people closest to the risk.
The near-miss goes to the GC’s superintendent, out loud, at the end of the shift. It never reaches the owner’s system.
of programs hear from less than half their frontline in a typical month
name frontline non-engagement as their single biggest obstacle
get more than three-quarters of their frontline reporting
Strong Analysis Is the Payoff
Analysis matters. It’s what turns a stack of reports into a decision. But it’s the payoff for getting engagement right, built on everything that comes before it.
The Decision Gap report says it well: “A solid dashboard fed by the whole operation outperforms a sophisticated one fed by partial data.” The same goes for AI. It’s only as good as what the workforce feeds it. Adoption is the AI strategy, too.
90 Day Plan
A 90-Day Plan to Close the Decision Gap
Here’s how to break the next three months down.
From Partial Picture to Whole Operation in 90 Days
Three phases, in order: get the field reporting, reach the crews that aren’t, then put the data in front of people who can act on it.
Make It Visible
- Your three most common event types, on a phone, in under a minute
- Forms in the languages your crews speak
- One severity scale and one SIF-potential flag, everywhere
- List every silent site — zero submissions in 30 days
A silent-site list that becomes your starting map
Get Past the Plateau
- Track the share of sites logging a near-miss every week
- Tell every reporter what happened next
- Put a QR code at the gate for contractors
- Move the safety review from quarterly to monthly
Reports coming from the quiet crews, not just the diligent ones
Build on the Data
- Weekly COO view: open SIF findings, how old, who owns each
- Link incident to corrective action to training
- Retire unused categories and break up “other”
Weekly decisions, and half as many silent sites
After day 90, make it a habit. Run a quarterly visibility review, owned by the safety leader and briefed to the COO.
Days 1–30: Make It Visible
Find your silent sites. Any location or crew with zero submissions in 30 days goes on a list. That’s your starting map.
Pick your three most common event types and get them into a digital form. Not twelve. Three.
Get them on a phone. If a worker can’t finish in under a minute with gloves on, cut fields.
Get them in the languages your workforce speaks. Ask your supervisors which languages that actually means.
Set the backbone. One severity scale and one SIF-potential flag, used on every form at every site.
Days 31–60: Get Past the Plateau
Speed up the clock. Move your safety review from quarterly to monthly to start. Aim for weekly by day 90.
Track the metric nobody else does: the share of locations submitting at least one near-miss every week.
Address the quiet crews, not the diligent ones. Build a 30-second report into routines that already happen, like the pre-task plan or the end of a toolbox talk.
Close the loop with every reporter. Tell people what happened to what they reported. Crews keep reporting when they can see it went somewhere.
Put contractors on the same footing. Make it easy for your contractors to contribute.
Days 61–90: Build on the Data
Tune the categories. With two months of data, retire the categories nobody uses and break up whatever’s hiding in “other.”
Make leadership see what’s aging. Each week, the COO gets three things: open SIF-potential findings, how long each has been open, and who owns it. A finding that’s aging in plain view is much harder to ignore than one sitting in a queue.
Link incidents to corrective action to training. When an incident opens a corrective action, and that action triggers retraining where it’s needed, you can see whether the fix actually stuck.
What to Measure
| Metric | How to Count It | Where Good Is |
|---|---|---|
| Frontline submission rate | Share of frontline workers who submitted anything in the last 30 days | Over 75% |
| Silent sites | Locations with zero submissions in the last 30 days | Half your day-1 count |
| Decision cadence | How often a safety review changes an operational decision | Weekly |
| SIF-precursor coverage | Share of near misses and observations reviewed and flagged for SIF potential | Every one reviewed, with flagged counts reported to leadership |
| Cross-module linkage | Share of incidents with a linked corrective action | Every serious incident |
After day 90, make it a habit. Run a quarterly visibility review, owned by the safety leader and briefed to the COO.
Customer Comparison
Where Novara Fits
The benchmark study included 46 Novara customers, and the comparison is worth calling out.
Novara customers are about twice as likely to be very confident their data would flag the next serious injury or fatality — 39%, against 19% of non-customers. They’re more likely to report leading indicators (91% vs. 62%) and SIF precursors (37% vs. 22%) to leadership. And 30% act on safety data weekly or more, against 19%.
The widest gap is in participation. Thirty percent of Novara customers clear 75% frontline engagement, versus 18% of non-customers.
One honest caveat: this is a survey, not a controlled trial. Companies that invest in a safety platform tend to invest in safety generally. But the pattern is consistent — on every measure that tracks with confidence, the Novara customer group sits higher.
The customer stories point the same way. Capital Precast employs an 80% Spanish-speaking workforce and was able to reduce incidents by 52%. The analytics didn’t get smarter. The workforce started reporting. Alleguard went from 0 to 90% training completion in six months. Quality Electric was able to cut their recordable injuries in half..
Flex is built for the person standing in front of the risk. A worker can report a safety event from a phone in about 30 seconds, including offline at remote sites. Contractors get their own app, and a QR scan verifies who’s on site. And it’s all-in-one, so the operation only learns one system.
Addresssing Obstacles
Closing the Loop on What’s in the Way
Here’s how an engagement-first program handles the three biggest obstacles leaders named in the benchmark.
Frontline workers don’t engage (29%). A 30-second report from the phone in their pocket, in the crew’s language, and a visible answer when they report something.
Leadership doesn’t act on what we surface (25%). Every finding gets a named owner, a due date, and an escalation path. Then the weekly COO view shows what’s open, how old it is, and whose it is.
Data lives in disconnected systems (17%). Incidents, inspections, training, and contractor records in one system — so the lapsed training behind a near-miss shows up before the next one.
The Work Is Unglamorous. The Outcomes Aren’t.
None of this is flashy. Shorter forms. More languages. A list of quiet sites. A meeting that happens weekly instead of quarterly.
But ninety days from now, you don’t need a perfect program. You need one where most crews report every week, every finding has an owner, and your COO sees what’s building before it turns into an incident.
Your safety data is only as good as the teams feeding it.
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.
