Recent research describing the occupational safety and health landscape reveals barriers to feeling safe at work – obstacles that come with important potential solutions that will be explored in this post.
For starters, more than nine in ten workers (96%) report – not surprisingly — that being physically safe at work is important to them, according to Alert Media’s 2025 Employee Safety Report, based on responses from more than 2,000 full-time employees in the U.S and 1,000 employees in the United Kingdom.
But more than half (56%) admit they don’t feel completely safe in their workplace.
Why?
Almost half (49%) report feeling high stress levels. Findings from the 2024 Employee Safety Report include:
- about one in five said their company has insufficient safety reporting processes, such as identifying and communicating workplace hazards (18%) and that hazardous working conditions in fact exist (17%).
- Company managers reported there are not enough safety training programs, drills and exercises (31%) and about one-quarter (23%) said it is not easy to report safety concerns such as hazardous conditions or provide feedback on issues such as correcting hazards.
- Other key factors driving safety insecurities include an employer’s emphasis on productivity (reported by 68% of respondents) and leadership demands for speed and output from employees at the expense of safety (reported by 21% of respondents).
Start With Hazard Observation & Reporting
Recognizing, reporting and mitigating hazardous conditions is foundational to making employees feel safe on the job. This requires consistent training in visual literacy – the skills necessary to interpret and understand visual information such as potentially hazardous work processes and behaviors, identifying potential hazards, and communicating observations clearly to prioritize and mitigate risks. This skillset calls for confidence, listening and learning, adaptability, problem-solving, drawing meaning from what we see, relying on one’s own senses, collaboration in hazard recognition audits or “hazard hunts,” trusting and depending on the vigilance of coworkers, and having honest and at times conflicting conversations about 1) What do you see? 2) What does it mean? And 3) What do you do about it? High stress levels and rushing to meet productivity goals and sustain speed and output are deterrents to developing visual literacy skills. Stress and rushing can lead to mindlessness.Mental stress can produce:
- Distracted thinking
- Lack of focus
- Running thoughts
- Worry and anxiety
- Shutting down mental processing and operating on autopilot
Rushing can result in:
- Short cuts
- At-risk behaviors
- Lack of awareness
- Lack of discipline
- Lack of communication and hazard reporting.
As a result critical thinking suffers – objective analysis and evaluation is disrupted. In its place, biases creep in. Thoughts can be taken up by favoring your judgment of a person over the facts; giving more weight to recent experiences rather than considering more relevant data; and depending on information that confirms what you believe while disregarding or downplay evidence that contradicts your beliefs. Mindless thinking and acting can lead to “highway hypnosis,” arriving at a destination without remembering how you got there. Operating any type of machinery without full focus and disciplined attention on the task clearly sets the state for risk-taking and injury. OSHA’s top four hazards for construction fatalities – struck by, caught in, falls and electrocutions – have all been tied to mindless, distracted, autopilot thinking, according to an article in Professional Safety.
The Mindful Approach
Mindful thinking is a practice that develops focus, attentiveness, disciplined concentration, and broad awareness of the surrounding environment (situational awareness). It promotes visual literacy by forcing a conscious pause in order to be mentally present “right here, right now” and better observe truths in our (working) environment instead of biases, assumptions, judgments and habitual thinking. Those truths include seeing workplace hazards that can be hidden by “fast brain” automatic thinking.
Fully concentrating all the senses in the present moment improves an individual’s mindfulness, emotional intelligence and emotional literacy, explained Jennifer Lastra, founder of 360 Immersive, a software training company, in a COVE post.
Mindful thinking, or mindfulness, is not about crystals and candles. It’s not alternative medicine, pillows, yoga mats and Zen, with meditation at its heart. Mindfulness is sometimes used interchangeably with meditation, but they are not the same. Mindfulness is a mental state in which you focus your senses and awareness on present circumstances – which can include the work environment and obvious or hidden hazards. Achieving a mindful mental state can be developed through short training exercises that teach employees to avoid or come back from distracted thinking and stick with one activity at a time, such as a hazard recognition exercise.
Meditation is an intentional practice that through regular repetition calms you down, helps you concentrate and achieve emotional grounding and balance by focusing on breathing, a word or phrase (a mantra), mental imagery (visualization), movement (walking meditation), or noticing physical sensations through a body scan.
Visual literacy is necessary for effective hazard identification, and mindfulness can complement both visual literacy and hazard recognition. Mindfulness enhances awareness and the use of the senses, particularly sight. It strengthens taking a purposeful approach to hazard identification by concentrating attention on just that one task. It quiets brain chatter and improves clarity of thinking. And it enhances situation awareness of hazardous conditions.
There are also potential health benefits. Mindfulness has been shown to reduce stress, improve mood, lower blood pressure, relax muscles, boost the immune system and get a better night’s sleep.
COVE presents numerous hazard recognition training programs including virtual two-hour workshops on “Seeing Safety: Introduction to Visual Literacy.” This workshop presents simple tools to improve employees’ ability to see hazards and it discusses how the brain controls what we see and why. At any given moment you are only seeing as little as 10% of what you think you are seeing. The other 90% of what appears in your visual field is being “generated” by your brain. Some of that information is drawn from memory, and some of it comes from other sensory experiences. Mindfulness helps reduce generated brain infill in order to focus with improved clarity on what appears in your visual field.
Want to help your team see more—and miss less?
COVE’s Visual Literacy workshops are designed to build the focus, discipline, and observational skills needed to strengthen hazard identification and prevent serious incidents.
