━ Overview
ISHN sat down with Benchmark Gensuite CEO R. Mukund for a wide-ranging Q&A on the workforce and operational pressures behind the 2026 EHS Benchmarking Report’s injury data — covering turnover, contractor risk, time shortages, underreporting, and the limits of AI adoption so far.
This page pulls the most substantive threads from that conversation into a single view of what’s actually driving the strain on EHS teams right now, and adds the operational context for what organizations can do about each pressure point.
━ Benchmark Gensuite Perspective
The instinctive read on rising injury rates is a discipline problem — a training gap somewhere, a policy nobody’s enforcing closely enough. That read doesn’t match up with what’s actually happening on EHS teams right now. Responsibilities have expanded on multiple fronts at once: sustainability reporting, emergency preparedness, and compliance expectations are all growing at the same time production demands continue to rise. Serious injuries are usually preceded by near misses or small deviations, and when teams are stretched thin across a wider mandate, they simply have less capacity to catch those warning signs early or act on them.
A large part of that strain traces back to the workforce itself. As experienced tradespeople retire and turnover climbs, a growing share of any given crew is new to the job or newly reassigned to it — and new hires are statistically the ones most likely to get hurt, simply because the instincts that keep a veteran out of trouble take time to develop on the floor, not simply a classroom session to complete. Contractors and temporary labor widen that gap further: most vetting still checks whether the right paperwork is on file, not whether the person actually knows the hazards of the specific site they’re walking into.
Time shortages compound both problems. Facilities are running at higher utilization with less downtime for inspections, coaching, and refresher training. When schedules tighten, onboarding gets delayed and safety activities get compressed — which shows up later as improper equipment use, rushed task execution, or gaps in oversight that widen over time.
“The increase reflects strain, not lack of commitment.”
— R. Mukund, Founder & CEO, Benchmark Gensuite
Underreporting is the piece that makes all of this harder to see coming. Nearly all organizations Benchmark Gensuite surveyed now say incidents, hazards, or near misses go underreported — and the honest explanation isn’t a culture problem, it’s a design problem. Ask a worker to pause a task, find a terminal, and re-enter what just happened somewhere else, and most of that information simply evaporates instead of getting logged. The fix isn’t a new reporting policy; it’s putting hazard capture inside the workflow the person is already standing in, so noticing something and recording it are effectively the same motion.
AI adds a final, counterintuitive wrinkle: adoption of generative and agentic AI across EHS teams is now nearly universal, yet it hasn’t moved injury rates. That’s because most of that use is still administrative — drafting documentation, summarizing incident reports, prepping for audits. Real, efficiency, but it doesn’t touch hazard exposure. Prevention requires connecting AI to the operational data — maintenance activity, workforce scheduling — where risk decisions actually get made, and most organizations haven’t gotten there yet.
Taken together, these pressures compound rather than operate independently. A team facing turnover, tighter schedules, weaker reporting visibility, and administrative-only AI use is effectively operating with a shrinking instrument panel. Closing that gap isn’t one intervention — it’s addressing all four pressure points at once.
━ Key themes
━ What this means for EHS leaders
━ Next steps
It’s tempting to treat rising injury and underreporting numbers as a headcount problem — add more EHS staff and the pressure eases. Headcount helps, but the more durable fix is closing the visibility gap between how fast operations are changing and how quickly safety systems can see and respond to that change.
Start by auditing where near misses and hazards are actually going unreported — most organizations already have a rough sense of which sites or shifts under-report, even without hard data. From there, prioritize moving hazard capture into the field workflows employees already use rather than a separate system, and structure onboarding and mentorship specifically around the higher-risk first year of employment rather than treating it as identical to ongoing training.
If you’re a current Benchmark Gensuite subscriber, the reporting and workforce visibility tools to act on this are already inside your platform — the opportunity is in how they’re deployed at the site level. If you’re evaluating EHS platforms, this data is a useful lens for that evaluation: ask any vendor specifically how their system reduces reporting friction at the point of work, not just how it stores the reports that do get filed.
━ Featured executive
Underlying research
This interview draws on findings from Benchmark Gensuite's 2026 EHS Benchmarking Report.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are workplace injury rates rising despite improving national safety trends?
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Why do workplace incidents and near misses go underreported?
Why hasn't widespread AI adoption reduced workplace injury rates?
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