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Why workplace safety needs a new playbook in 2026, not just new effort

On EHS Today’s Great Question podcast, Benchmark Gensuite’s Chief Strategy Officer Donavan Hornsby breaks down why injury severity is climbing even as minor incidents decline, what’s really behind chronic underreporting, and where AI can meaningfully help EHS teams carrying more responsibility than ever.

published

March 3, 2026

Originally covered by

TOPIC

Workplace Safety & Risk

· Podcast

Donavan Hornsby
Chief Market Strategy Officer

As covered in

EHS Today

━ Overview

EHS Today’s Great Question podcast recently sat down with Benchmark Gensuite Chief Strategy Officer Donavan Hornsby to talk through the findings behind the company’s annual survey of global EHS leaders — and what those findings signal for safety programs heading into 2026. The conversation covered rising complexity, shrinking resources, and where AI genuinely fits into the picture.

This page builds on that conversation with a closer look at the data patterns Hornsby referenced, what they mean operationally for different types of EHS teams, and the practical steps organizations can take in response.

━ Benchmark Gensuite Perspective

Why safety data is getting harder to read — and what that means for 2026 planning

Most EHS dashboards tell a reassuring story. Overall incident frequency has trended downward for years, driven largely by steady reductions in minor injuries — slips, trips, small cuts, the kinds of incidents that are easiest to prevent once an organization builds basic safety discipline. That trend line is real, and it reflects genuine progress.

But it’s also incomplete. A single aggregate frequency number can decline year over year while the incidents that matter most — Serious Injuries and Fatalities, the cases where someone ends up in the hospital or worse — hold flat or climb. That’s the pattern showing up in Benchmark Gensuite’s most recent global survey of EHS leaders: minor incident categories improving while injury severity worsens. Two different trend lines, moving in opposite directions, hiding inside the same dashboard.

Several forces are converging to produce that gap. Organizations are leaning more heavily on contractor workforces to absorb operational demand, and contractors often arrive with less site-specific training and less familiarity with local hazards than long-tenured employees. When prequalification and risk assessment for that contractor labor become a paperwork exercise rather than a genuine evaluation, the risk those workers carry gets underestimated systematically — not because anyone is negligent, but because the process wasn’t built for how much of the workforce is now contracted.

Underreporting compounds the problem. Even with years of investment in reporting tools and safety culture initiatives, a meaningful share of near-misses and safety concerns still never make it into the system — a gap that shows up not as an industry-wide statistic, but as something individual EHS leaders recognize within their own operations. That means the frequency and severity numbers organizations are already seeing likely understate the true state of risk on the ground.

“I’m not saying AI is going to solve everything, but it can certainly help”

— Donavan Hornsby, Chief Strategy Officer, Benchmark Gensuite

None of this points to a lack of commitment from EHS teams — quite the opposite. Safety professionals have absorbed a widening set of responsibilities, from traditional operational safety to broader ESG accountability, without a proportional increase in headcount or bandwidth. The gap isn’t effort. It’s that the volume of contractor documentation, hazard patterns, and compliance obligations has outpaced what manual review can keep up with — which is precisely the kind of workload that purpose-built AI, including the Program Expert Agents inside Benchmark Gensuite’s Genny AI platform, is designed to absorb, freeing EHS teams to spend their limited time on the field engagement and judgment calls that actually reduce serious injuries.

45%

Reported increased injury frequency within their own organization

39%

Reported increased injury severity within their own organization

━ Key themes

Three things to understand about today's workplace safety data

1

Self-reported organizational data isn't the same as an industry-wide trend

The frequency and severity increases in the survey reflect what individual EHS leaders see within their own operations — not a documented shift across the industry as a whole. That distinction matters: it means the risk is real and worth acting on, but it isn't evenly distributed, and organizations with weaker contractor oversight or reporting culture are likely driving a disproportionate share of it.
2

A falling overall incident rate can coexist with a rising SIF problem

Because minor and significant incidents don't move together, a dashboard trending in the right direction can mask a serious injury and fatality trend moving in the wrong one. Teams that only track a single blended frequency metric may be missing the signal that matters most for preventing catastrophic outcomes.
3

Contractor risk assessment is often a compliance exercise, not a real evaluation

As more operational risk shifts to third-party labor, the prequalification processes meant to catch that risk haven't scaled with it. Treating contractor vetting as a checkbox rather than genuine due diligence is a structural gap, not an individual failure — and it's one of the more addressable drivers of rising severity.

━ What this means for EHS leaders

Operational implications

EHS leaders relying on a single incident-frequency metric should add a dedicated view of SIF-category incidents to their reporting. A blended dashboard can look stable while a serious-injury trend is actively worsening underneath it — separating the two is the only way to catch that shift early.
Multi-site operations with significant contractor labor carry disproportionate exposure to the gap between prequalification-on-paper and actual site risk. Strengthening contractor onboarding and hazard orientation — not just contract-stage paperwork — directly addresses one of the more concrete drivers behind rising injury severity.
Safety and sustainability teams managing expanded ESG scope are absorbing more responsibility without proportional resourcing. Naming that capacity gap explicitly — rather than treating it as a temporary crunch — helps leadership understand why certain safety investments, including AI-supported workflow tools, are becoming operational necessities rather than optional upgrades.
Executives evaluating where to invest in AI for safety should look past administrative use cases like report drafting and summarization toward the underreporting and contractor-risk analysis work that currently consumes EHS bandwidth without adding much value — that’s where automation converts directly into fewer serious incidents, not just faster paperwork.

━ Next steps

What organizations should do now

The instinct when injury severity numbers move in the wrong direction is to work harder within the existing process. The more durable response is to examine whether the process itself — how contractor risk gets assessed, how near-misses get captured, how SIF trends get separated from overall frequency — was ever built for the level of complexity EHS teams are now managing.

Start by pulling SIF-category incidents out of your blended frequency metric so leadership can see the trend that matters most on its own. Audit how contractor risk assessments actually get completed on the ground, not just how the policy describes them. And take a hard look at where your team’s time goes each week — if a meaningful share is spent on manual document review and pattern-spotting rather than field engagement, that’s the workload most worth automating first.

If you’re a current Benchmark Gensuite subscriber, the Genny AI platform’s Program Expert Agents are already built to absorb exactly this kind of manual analytical load. If you’re evaluating how AI fits into your safety strategy more broadly, this conversation is a useful starting point for identifying where your team’s real capacity gaps sit before choosing a tool to fill them.

━ Featured executive

Donavan Hornsby

Chief Market Strategy Officer - Benchmark Gensuite

Donavan Hornsby has dedicated more than 20 years to the advancement of Environmental, Health, and Safety principles and best practices in industry. As Chief Market Strategy Officer at Benchmark Digital Partners LLC and the Benchmark Gensuite digital solution, he provides strategic direction for global business and market development, and leads product leadership and innovation for the organization. In addition to his executive responsibilities, Donavan is an active thought leader and participant in cross-industry efforts to advance EHS impact and best practices.

Prior to joining Benchmark Gensuite in 2001, Donavan held leadership roles across technology and service sectors. He received his MBA with distinction from the University of Louisville and his undergraduate degree from DePauw University.

Outside of his professional commitments, Donavan leads a non-profit organization working with landowners to protect and conserve land with special natural, agricultural, or scenic value in his home state of Kentucky.

Originally covered in

EHS Today

March 3, 2026

About the AI Agent framework

Why is workplace injury severity increasing in 2026?

Organizations have made real progress reducing minor incidents like slips and falls, but that progress masks a separate trend: significant injury frequency and severity has plateaued or risen. Rising operational complexity, contractor exposure, and workforce turnover are concentrating risk in the categories that cause the most serious harm.

What is driving underreporting of safety incidents?

Despite years of investment in reporting systems and safety culture programs, many organizations still see meaningful gaps between incidents that occur and incidents that get formally reported. Contributing factors include reporting fatigue, fear of blame, and safety processes that were not designed for today’s more complex, contractor-heavy operations.

How does contractor workforce risk affect workplace safety data?

As organizations shift more operational risk onto third-party contractors, they bring in workers with less site-specific training and familiarity with hazards. When contractor risk assessments and prequalification are treated as a compliance checkbox rather than a genuine evaluation, the true risk those workers carry often goes underestimated.

Why do minor incidents keep declining while significant incidents increase?

Most EHS dashboards track overall incident frequency, which has trended down for years as minor injuries decline. But that headline number can obscure a flat or rising trend in Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIFs) specifically, because minor and significant incidents don’t necessarily move together.

What did Benchmark Gensuite's EHS Pressure Point report find?

The report, based on a global survey of 200-300 organizations, found rising operational complexity, shrinking EHS resources, and a growing but administratively-focused shift toward AI adoption. Respondents reported year-over-year increases in both injury frequency and injury severity within their own organizations.

How can AI help EHS teams manage rising complexity and shrinking resources?

AI is not a substitute for safety judgment, but it can absorb the manual analytical work — parsing contractor documentation, flagging risk patterns, surfacing underreported hazards — that currently consumes EHS teams’ limited bandwidth, freeing them to focus on the field engagement and decision-making that require human expertise.

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