Workplace safety is a growing priority in 2025, with nearly half of organizations (47%) reporting increased executive focus on safety initiatives.
Despite this attention, Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) professionals continue to face significant challenges like workforce shortages and regulatory pressures that threaten to stall progress towards safety gains and overall EHS progress.
The 2025 EHS Benchmarking Report, based on a survey of over 100 EHS professionals, captures these significant pain points while highlighting new opportunities to drive safety, compliance, and innovation in the year ahead.
Here’s what we learned about the evolving responsibilities of the EHS profession and how teams can position themselves for safety success.
Navigating the Challenges of Worker Safety
Workplace safety remains a significant and overwhelming challenge for organizations across different industries. Over half of EHS leaders report that injury frequency (53%) and injury severity (51%) either remained stagnant or increased in 2024, a troubling trend linked to a combination of key factors. The main drivers can be attributed to workforce issues like high turnover rates and hiring challenges (55%), insufficient training (34%), and time and manpower shortages (31%).
Yet, the most alarming issue is that 79% of respondents believe that accidents, hazards, concerns, and near misses are underreported. EHS professionals cited manual processes such as long paper forms or verbal discussions (43%) and a fear of backlash attributed to confidentiality issues (33%) as obstacles preventing workers from reporting. Fifteen percent reported language barriers as another hindrance when it comes to safety reporting.
The Evolving Role of EHS Professionals: Doing More with Less
On top of workplace safety, the role of EHS leaders is becoming more complex. As ESG and sustainability initiatives continued to gain momentum last year, 45% of leaders said ESG and sustainability-related goals were diverting their focus from reaching safety goals. Another 35% of respondents cited a need to shift their focus to compliance given the rapidly evolving regulatory landscape. EHS leaders are also increasingly tasked with crisis management and emergency response (25%), quality-related processes (21%), and corporate security and workplace violence (15%). These growing responsibilities diminish safety leaders’ time and bandwidth to pay adequate attention to achieving core safety goals.
Exacerbating the issue further, 49% of leaders still rely on manual spreadsheet management or outdated technology solutions. Additionally, less than 2% of respondents are using AI to collect and track EHS data, representing a massive missed opportunity.
AI: The Key to Safety and Business Success
Being bogged down by manual processes and outdated technologies is not conducive to increasing safety on the job. That’s why 39% of companies are increasing AI investments for EHS within the next 12 months. AI is transforming how safety leaders approach their work, offering new solutions to long-standing problems. Survey respondents cited several high-impact EHS applications, with 60% investing in AI for data analysis to efficiently predict the likelihood of unplanned events like injuries. Other applications that respondents are implementing in 2025 include AI-powered video analysis (50%), AI-powered prompts (50%), and automated classification as well as trend monitoring and alerting (48%).
With 59% of organizations confident that generative AI could help predict and prevent more injuries as well as enable safety leaders to reduce downtime, protect workers, and maintain business operations, the promise of AI delivering on efficiency is becoming a reality.
Takeaways for EHS Professionals
In 2025, EHS leaders have a unique opportunity to address key safety challenges by innovating with technology like AI, fostering stronger worker engagement, and aligning safety initiatives with overall business goals and objectives. Safety is no longer just an operational concern for EHS leaders, it’s a strategic driver of business success.
Download Benchmark Gensuite’s 2025 EHS Benchmarking Report to dive deeper into the industry’s biggest challenges and learn how technology is playing a crucial role in improving worker safety.
