Scattered Safety Data? How to Get Unstuck and Show Leadership the Value of Safety 

Nobody sets out to scatter their safety data. It just happens. Your training system is logged in one spreadsheet, a shared inbox houses corrective actions, and data goes into another file.  Each choice made sense at the time. Then a few years go by, a site gets acquired, and leadership asks for a simple status update. 

That was the heart of our recent EHS Today webinar, Getting Unstuck: Moving Past Scattered Safety Data and Siloed Teams. I joined my colleague Jim Albright to talk through what I’ve seen over eight years of helping EHS and process safety teams pull their data together. Here are the biggest takeaways, plus a simple way to get started. 

And if you missed it, here’s the full recording:

Types of scattered safety data 

Most teams will recognize at least one of these situations: 

• Training records are hard to access and rarely checked until something is overdue. 

• Corrective actions are tracked through email and memory and follow up depends on who remembers. 

• Inspection findings have multiple spreadsheets, with one version per site or per person. 

• Critical deadlines end up with one person and no team visibility. 

When we asked registrants where they house safety data, 60% of the 211 who answered picked two or more places. Half named email and shared drives, and 59% named spreadsheets. In our live poll, 27 of 48 attendees (56%) said they rely on a mix of different systems, and only 2 said they have a connected safety platform. To an auditor, that mix looks like records that are hard to access, inconsistent from one place to the next, and missing any guardrails to keep them complete. 

One manufacturer we’ve worked with spent weeks preparing for a scheduled audit. They used a forklift to pull a pallet of paper binders out of storage, then took people off the production line to sort through them. That takes weeks of work and panic. 

The downsides of disconnected data 

I like to break the cost into three buckets: audit risk, rework, and gut decisions. 

• Audit risk. Prep is difficult when you’re pulling data from several places. 

• Rework. People have to rebuild reports by hand, retype information, and chase down corrective actions. The quality of your metrics suffers when you have to redo paperwork. 

• Gut decisions. When operations and leadership can’t see what safety does, decisions won’t make sense. 

The numbers from our AIHA webinar survey (78 respondents) back this up. 82% are only somewhat confident, or less, that they could pull a full hazard report within 24 hours. 35% juggle multiple tools or spreadsheets to track corrective actions across departments, and 15% have no reliable method at all. 

Our live poll pulled similar results. We asked attendees how confident they were that they could give leadership an accurate update on safety performance today. Only 11 of 45 said they felt very confident. Another 28 said they could, but it would take significant effort, and 6 were not very confident. 

Improving data visibility 

When I’m asked for the root cause, visibility is my answer. Leadership cares about time, cost, performance, and risk exposure. Saying “we completed 100 inspections” doesn’t land. They want to know outcomes. Did they reduce risk? How many critical corrective actions are overdue? Are near misses going down? 

A few examples of safety data that leadership tends to trust: 

• Time: hours spent on audit prep or how long it takes to pull a report 

• Follow through: corrective actions open versus overdue, and average days to close 

• Readiness: training currency and inspections completed on schedule 

• Exposure: repeat findings across sites and high-risk items still open 

The visibility gap shows up in process safety too. At a recent Frontline webinar with Onterris, we asked attendees whether their site reports management of change (MOC) cycle time to leadership. 40% said yes, 37% said no, and 23% did not know. (MOC is the review a site runs before it changes equipment, processes, or people.) Nearly a quarter of the room could not say whether leadership sees this metric at all. 

One administrator I’ve worked with tied his plant’s training compliance back to incident reporting and proved the connection with data. He’s no longer just at the plant. He’s at the corporate office now, seeing that initiative through. 

Three steps to get unstuck 

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Start small, with something that has a measurable impact. 

1. Pick one process. Choose a process that causes the most chasing. The most common starting point we see is corrective actions, since a high-risk item that goes overdue matters far more than a low priority one. Training records and audit prep are also good candidates. 

2. Chart the process path. List every source that has data for the process and who owns each one. Record this as your baseline. Without a baseline, you have nothing to compare against when you improve it. 

3. Connect the process in one place. Bring that one process into one place. Add owners and due dates. Ownership can’t be shared, so name one person who keeps the data clean and follows up. Spreadsheets aren’t bad, but they get clunky fast when no one owns them. Then expand to the next process. 

One of our customers did this 3-step program. They started small with a single process, tracked a baseline, and showed leadership how the change improved efficiency. That got them approval to move 27 new processes onto their platform, one at a time. It’s a great time of year to try this. 2027 is right around the corner, so you can do the first two steps now and start measuring in the new year. 

I always tell clients that workflows are never finished. They’re evergreen. Your business keeps changing, so expect to revisit and tweak the process from time to time. 

Make reporting easy for the people on the floor 

If a form is long or confusing, people skip it, especially for minor incidents and near misses. Decide what you absolutely need at submission, and gather the rest later. Our incident reporting guidance goes deeper, and our post on documenting near misses is a good place to start. 

A little fun helps, too. One site I know rolled out a new near miss reporting system and ran a raffle for the first six months. Every near miss you submitted counted as a raffle ticket, and the prize was a cooler. Should everyone go out and buy coolers? Probably not, but I liked it as a different way to get people to participate. The teams I see having the most success also celebrate a good catch, because everyone likes recognition. Some offer anonymous reporting, too, so people never worry about being held accountable. And lunch and learns are a good way to remind people what changed and why. 

When a process changes, training has to change with it. Teams miss this more often than you’d think, and it usually only comes up after an incident, when someone asks what a person was trained on. Running process changes through a review that generates a training item keeps the two connected. 

Where to go from here?

• Download The Safety Simplified Playbook for a checklist to assess your program, standardize key workflows, and automate repetitive tasks. 

• See how Frontline ACT keeps incidents and corrective actions in one place, with owners and due dates. 

• Watch for more sessions on our webinars and events page. 

• Ready to see it in action? Get a free demo.