Thanks mainly to improved safety practices, since the introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act in 1974 there’s been a welcome 85% decline in workplace fatalities. Nonetheless, according to the HSE, last year 138 workers still lost their lives in work-related accidents—most of whom (88) were employees of companies, and the rest were self-employed. There were a very concerning 604,000 non-fatal workplace injuries for the same period, a stat that worryingly is 7.6% up on the year before.

The reality is that workplace safety is still a challenging issue for HR leaders working for companies, no matter what the size, that asks its people to earn their living in potentially harmful environments. And for all the good it’s done, many people believe that the 1974 Act needs updating; last year workplace safety solutions provider Dräger found in the light of changing workplaces and different working styles, a very high 94% of workers say it needs a major update.

That may not happen soon, but whatever the new government may do, the fact remains that the HR team does what it can to follow the law regarding employee safety, and “avoid being the subject of an HSE investigation and possibly highly adverse publicity.”

Workplace safety compliance challenges

The problem of workplace safety is hardly just a UK issue, but HR leaders will read these numbers and be determined that 2025 will be yet another year they steer clear of what the NHS calls ‘never events’ occurring. You can’t be too careful on the health and safety front, because you can never assume people will tell you the truth about their real level of safety training and awareness, and so may try to operate machinery or work with equipment that they shouldn’t be anywhere near.

This is a cross-industry problem, too: the risk of falls from height, improper use of machinery and equipment, but also specific risks around accidental collapses, excessive noise and vibration, possible injury to operatives from chemicals or strong pollutants, and much more—it’s the workplace safety manager’s nightmare.

Potentially, if a company is sued for negligence (for, say, missing an induction check that leads to an accident involving that employee) that could end up putting you as the HR compliance owner under the spotlight to check if all the right processes were followed by the Health and Safety team. Environmental workplace safety may not be your remit, but it is ultimately HR’s responsibility to ensure that the safety manager is consistently and accurately supporting the business by keeping us all legally compliant.

A useful litmus test to make this easier: right now, would you pass an ISO 45001 audit?

But should it be just their problem? Best practice tells us that to have an effective workplace safety culture, everyone in the organisation, employees and contractors alike, share the responsibility to work safely. What can the HR leader of 2025 do to make this happen?

Training, tracking, technology

It means investing in the best modern/digital, integrated workplace safety systems, and supporting it with appropriate training, competency and digital compliance management.

Start with the message that everyone working in your company is correctly trained, that inductions are comprehensive, so all are confident in the work they have to undertake. It’s no longer acceptable to assume a contractor is proficient with a piece of equipment just because they read the manual back in 2012; you need to know if their knowledge is up-to-date.

In today’s fast-paced work environment, this is best done with not just on-site training but e-learning ideally delivered by mobile and in the cloud, so it is always accessible, keeps them updated and checks their progress. Many organisations say that a lot of problems can be headed off by an in-depth induction to capture details about, for example, your new people’s current state of accreditation, and so on.

You will prevent potential workplace safety problems by ensuring that the people turning up on site are only ever the ones fully trained and sector regulation compliant. So, tracking: you need to know with 100% certainty that only bearers of the correct credentials get past the front desk, and the best way to do that is to have at the heart of your workplace safety practices an integrated and smart workplace safety system.

And that can’t be Excel anymore, let alone paper. I hear from global organisations conducting large projects that having one central, digitised way of conducting workplace safety checks means they can view all important workplace safety information through one lens, and so always know where the company stands in terms of risks at any one time.

Ideally, such a technology will include both company and individual documents and worker compliance/non-compliance status, which allows them to deep dive from there into the individual profiles. Possible significant updates to the Act, along with a raft of other mooted changes to do things like better protect whistleblowers, as well as an increased commitment to employee well-being could mean more demanding compliance regulations, requiring a truly data-driven approach to safety management.

My advice: get ahead of the issue now by embracing integrated workplace safety, aiming to engineer a safer and more efficient workplace that you, your employees, your customers, and your shareholders can expect as standard from your business going forward.