Workplace safety data is moving from the OHS silo into the boardroom – and CHROs need to lead that shift, say experts
Once the exclusive domain of operations managers and occupational health and safety officers, safety analytics are rapidly becoming a boardroom concern – and CHROs who fail to embrace this shift risk leaving their organizations behind, according to Peter Smith, President and Senior Scientist at the Institute for Work and Health in Toronto.
For Smith, many organizations still treat safety as a compliance checkbox rather than a driver of business performance, which is a strategic mistake.
“Often businesses fail to see the broader economic returns of investing in safety,” says Smith. “There’s research that shows that when organizations move beyond compliance, they tend to reduce turnover, retain high quality staff, and improve product quality.”
Safety data in HR's toolkit
The shift is already underway in many larger Canadian organizations, according to Paul Andre, Vice-President, Finance at Health and Safety Professionals Canada. He says that HR departments have naturally become hubs for employee-related data – and safety data is a logical extension of that function.
“It's certainly not uncommon to see that data rest within an HR department because they're collecting other data related to the employees within the organization,” says Andre. “HR is continually producing data for the organization to help it make decisions – everything from sick time to attendance, but certainly safety measures both in terms of lost time and injury rates, but also other measures within the organization.”
Smith says that the case for integration of safety data into HR strategy goes beyond efficiency. When HR and occupational health and safety (OHS) data are managed in concert, organizations gain a richer picture of workforce health – particularly in relation to the increasing recognition of employee mental health as key to productivity and success, he says.
“If you focus just on the physical hazards and you don't focus on the psychosocial hazards, or vice versa, you'll never get the gains you want,” he says. “By focusing on both, you reduce both physical injuries and psychological injuries. Psychosocial hazards impact physical injuries, and physical hazards also impact psychological injuries.”
This integrated view – spanning everything from injury rates and near-miss events to bullying, harassment, and job control – reflects a modern understanding of workplace safety that aligns directly with HR's existing mandate around people, culture, and wellbeing, says Smith.
Making the business case at the board level
For HR leaders looking to secure executive and board support for greater investment in safety analytics, both experts point to one overriding principle: connect safety performance to financial outcomes.
“There's certainly a case to be made that good safety performance also supports good financial performance,” says Andre. “Linking the safety performance of the organization to the financial performance is a case that needs to be made from HR – demonstrating that the investment the organization is making in safety is having a payoff both in terms of occupational health and safety performance, but more broadly its performance as an organization.”
Smith agrees, pointing to the example of hospitals with higher rates of workplace violence and bullying – a 2022 poll of health-care workers by CUPE found 63 per cent experienced physical violence in their workplaces and 78 per cent were subject to non-physical violence such as threats and insults –also have higher rates of medical errors, as an example. “Tying those things together and not seeing them as one's the job of occupational health and safety and one's the job of human resources – seeing them as a strategic business direction to improve safety and improve product quality makes a lot of sense and is backed up by research evidence.”
HR professionals who regularly track workforce analytics and people metrics will recognize a familiar pattern: the case for investment is strongest when it’s built on longitudinal data that connects inputs – safety activities, training, inspections, employee engagement – to outcomes in retention, productivity, and cost.
Andre says that safety dashboards should go beyond lagging indicators such as lost-time injury rates to include what he calls “positive measures” – the number of frontline supervisor inspections completed, for example, or proactive hazard assessments conducted and resolved.
The ethics of AI and safety surveillance
As AI-powered tools, wearables, and predictive safety platforms become more accessible, HR leaders face a new set of questions about how to use richer data responsibly. Both experts caution that the technology is only as effective as the employee trust underpinning its use.
“Any data that you're gathering should be aggregate data – not specific to an individual,” says Andre. “Privacy needs to be kept in mind, and certainly the view of the workforce that any data you're looking to collect is being treated with care and as confidential.”
Smith believes that organizations with low levels of employee trust shouldn’t rush to deploy surveillance tools: “If employees don't trust the activity or the collection of data, don't know what it's being used for and see it as a threat, then that's going to lead to lack of compliance with wearables, gaming of AI systems, and false survey responses,” he says. “What drives being able to use this type of information well is already having a work environment where employees trust the process and know what it's going to be used for.”
His advice to HR leaders is to involve employees at every stage: in determining what’s collected, how it’s collected, and how results are reported back and acted upon. "Those types of processes help build trust and actually help you get the most out of the information you're collecting,” says Smith.
The CHRO's evolving role in safety strategy
Looking ahead, both Smith and Andre call for a decisive shift in how CHROs position themselves relative to workplace safety. For Smith, the boundaries between HR, OHS, and even finance need to come down entirely.
“Things that happen around OHS will eventually impact HR in terms of employee retention and having to hire new employees, and they'll also affect the finances of the organization, so we might as well break down those silos with the CFO as well,” he says. “We need a shared set of approaches to improving occupational health and safety and having excellence around human resources, because, increasingly, for a lot of workplaces where we're now thinking about both physical and psychosocial hazards, those hazards span both HR and occupational health and safety, so it makes sense to address them in a coordinated fashion rather than addressing them separately and in a siloed fashion.”
Andre encourages large organizations to invest in dedicated OHS expertise as a partner function to HR, rather than expecting generalist HR professionals to carry the full burden of safety strategy. “HR professionals can wear a lot of different hats, but they should look for specific expertise in occupational health and safety within their organization to help support the outcomes they're looking for,” he says.
Smith believes that the data is already there, as is the competitive case to make it part of HR strategy for organizations. “Making those links clear to senior leadership helps move safety from a compliance issue to a more strategic objective for an organization – to differentiate it from its competitors and position it well within the marketplace.”
