“If a safety update is posted and no one reads it, did it even exist?” 

According to research, as many as 81% of employees have personally experienced an emergency or safety incident at work. 35% feel unprepared to navigate these events.  Largely, this is due to a lack of effective safety communication in the workplace. As many (or much?!?) as 39% of frontline employees say there is poor communication around safety in the workplace, with a shocking 56% stating a lack of timely updates leads to them feeling overall unsafe at work. Clearly, this needs fixing.

But what is safety communication in the first place? What are the things organizations might be missing when it comes to ensuring effective safety communication? And how to fix these bottlenecks, especially since safety is so crucial on the frontline? In this blog, we uncover the code to help you ensure effective safety communications for your organization.

What even is safety communication (and why it’s not just posters in the break room)

Effective safety communication involves reaching the right people with targeted messaging, ensuring that information critical to worker well-being and safety is delivered promptly and clearly. This includes information such as:

• Real-time updates
• Shift handovers
• Hazard alerts
• Emergency protocols

Even though circulating this information to the right people at the right time is vital, there seems to be a broken link, especially for frontline workers.

What’s broken in safety communication?

Most companies follow a standard policy for communicating safety matters for all workers across the organization, irrespective of where they work from. For example, put up posters on the office bulletin board, announce in monthly meetings, share presentations over virtual meetings, or send out emails throughout the organization for safety comms. 

While these approaches work just fine for desk workers, this is exactly where the gap begins to really show up for frontline workers. Think about it: How often will a construction or manufacturing worker actually check an email? Do they have a work email in the first place? Suppose they do, and happen to check their inbox, but do not understand what’s written and ignore it, whose responsibility is it?  Or perhaps when they need to look up that important document, but are not able to find it easily? Now, let’s suppose this communication is about safely operating a forklift. Imagine the consequences!

Long story short, the problem is: 

• Most frontline workers are on their toes, carrying out their day-to-day roles. 
• Conventional comms channels like emails or posters in hidden corners don’t work with them as these often get missed while they’re working on their shifts.
• Even if they do happen to read these messages, there can always be instances of unclear communication. 
• Without a feedback loop, this can lead to a gap and unfortunate, costly, and dangerous outcomes. 

The real cost of crappy safety comms

Any gaps in safety comms can result in much more inconvenience. They can be dangerous and costly. According to estimates from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), employers pay nearly $1 billion weekly for direct workers' compensation costs (yep, a billion - WEEKLY). Over and above monetary costs, faltering in proper safety communication leads to:

Injuries, incidents, and disruption of work

Workers are the lifeblood of any organization. Even if safety communication reaches workers but remains unclear, those employees are left to make assumptions. This confusion leads to mistakes and even accidents that could have been prevented. If they’re injured, the resource stops working, hampering smooth operations. 

Contempt and a hit on employee morale

In the event of any incidents, other workers tend to get demoralized. Sometimes, they develop contempt for the company, especially if safety protocols are not communicated promptly and effectively. This lowers employee morale, engagement and experience, with a spiral of adverse effects.

Legal, compliance, and reputation nightmares

Alongside disturbing the internal environment, safety incidents also attract external damage. For example, legal and compliance implications for employers. Additionally, there can be irreversible reputational harm as well. According to OSHA estimates, penalties for serious violations can be as high as $16,550 per violation, and for willful or repeated violations, the penalty can reach $165,514 per violation.

All these facts clarify: Ignoring effective safety communication isn’t a wise bet. Getting it right is non-negotiable because when safety communication is effective:

• Compliance rates can improve
• Incidents can decrease
• Engagement with safety programs can increase.
• A culture of ownership and accountability can develop.
  
  

This brings us to the pertinent question:

How to actually fix safety comms 

It’s simpler than you think, with the interventions below.

1. Use a mobile-first tool (hi - it’s us 👋)

Effective safety comms starts with using a suitable platform that works for the needs of frontline workers. In today’s day and age, this means providing these workers with a tool that delivers these safety updates to them easily in real-time. 

For frontline workers, the best place to receive these updates is on their mobile devices. This way, they won’t need a desktop or an email necessarily to view updates. They can access their messages on the factory floor, during a client visit, or even at a construction site, and stay updated with any safety comms.

Putting this into practice is simple by relying on an employee comms mobile-first tool that’s exclusively built for frontline workers. If this app is embedded with features like read receipts, acknowledgments, and push notifications (like Speakap is), you’ll have a foolproof way to ensure messages are always seen and acted upon.

2. Get smart with timing

With safety comms, timing is everything. If you reach out, but it is the wrong time, your communication may not work. How do you get the timing right?

Enter workplace analytics to give you the true picture and guidance. You can access your employee app’s data to scientifically determine when your team is most active. This way, you can schedule messages at the appropriate time and get maximum engagement. Getting access to this intel is easier than you think when you use a tool like Speakap.

3. Make critical messages impossible to miss

Alongside using the right tool and sending messages at the right time, what’s equally vital is ensuring your message is unmissable. This won’t happen if you’re constantly spamming and causing information overload. You need to take care to limit noise and ensure the right information gets the right amount of attention. How? 

Speakap, for example, can help you tackle this by making it easy to pin essential posts. This way, you can easily limit channel noise and ensure that critical information doesn’t get overlooked. There’s also the option of sending specific updates to different groups. So basically, the factory floor doesn’t need to get spammed with a notification for the headquarters, or for that matter, a notification for the frontline sales staff either. 

4. Create comms that don’t resonate 

Striking a chord on the human aspect is another vital part of the effective safety comms puzzle. If your messages are not engaging or understandable, you’ll only go so far, even if you reach your people.

To that end, what’s important is to remember to skip the jargon and corporate speak. Use simple language, relatable scenarios, with clear actionable messaging.  Consider enhancing your content with visuals and videos. That’s because, according to research, viewers retain 95% of a video’s message (compared to 10% when reading the text version).

5. Enable a feedback loop and act on it

Last but not least, prioritize two-way communication. You need to empower your workers with a way to clarify doubts, should they have any. Without it, all your efforts may not bear fruit. 

Providing an open communication pathway again boils down to your employee app. Using Speakap makes it easy to create a feedback loop. With it, your employees can easily flag risks or ask questions through forms, surveys, and even flag concerns with emojis. This way, you know where you need to intervene before it’s too late.

Real talk: What happens when safety communication actually works

Let’s look at the story of Shell Connect: With over 4,000 employees spread across hundreds of locations, the oil and gas giant was struggling to ensure the right message reaches the right person at the right time. They were regularly sending out operational updates, campaign news, safety, and compliance info. However, these remained scattered across inboxes, printouts, and group chats. 

For a hazard-prone industry like the one Shell is in, getting this right from the safety and compliance standpoint was vital to avoid mishaps. To address this, along with their larger comms problem, their team didn’t start looking for more tools to streamline safety comms. Instead, they sat down to look at the situation holistically and address it. 

We wanted something that felt natural for frontline teams. Easy, mobile, actually useful. Not just another top-down broadcast.

• Kathy van der Wijden, Communications Coordinator for the Benelux and France cluster at Shell

With careful consideration, they chose Speakap’s employee experience platform, designed for the frontline and with frontline needs in mind. This would be their single source of truth, while helping finer aspects like comms, onboarding, and so on. 

Their  primary reasons for choosing Speakap included:

• It was mobile-first from the start. 
• The tool was brandable and familiar.
• It had privacy and compliance-ready features.
• It was video-friendly.

The results: 

• Over 90% of frontline staff were active on the app within weeks.
• Zero PDFs were left in inboxes by week four.
• They achieved 1,200+ views on a single campaign video — the kind of reach email never got close to.
• Real-time info was accessible anytime via the knowledge base to all workers.
• Reach became measurable.

It’s not hard to correlate how this choice impacted their safety outcomes. They can now be confident that improper safety communication is unlikely to be a reason for them to encounter any workplace hazards.  

Are you ready to level up your safety communication?

Safety communication isn't about checking a box; it's about keeping your people safe and your company out of the headlines. By leveraging the right communication tools for frontline workers(like ahem, Speakap), you can ensure that critical information reaches the right people at the right time, thereby building a safer, more engaged workplace. 

Want to see how it works for yourself? Get in touch with us and we'd love to tell you more

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