Your safety program works. But is your safety communication strategy keeping up?

It's National Safety Month. And if you work in manufacturing, healthcare, energy, or logistics, you've probably spent some time recently reviewing your safety programs, updating training records, or planning a safety stand-down.

That's the right instinct.

But there’s another question organizations should be asking: What happens when critical information never actually reaches the people who need it?

After all, there's a difference between sending a message and having it land. In most organizations, that divide is wider than leadership teams realize.

We’ll start with Firstup's 2026 State of Employee Engagement Report, which surveyed more than 6,000 employees across North America and the United Kingdom. When it comes to safety, the findings should stop organizations mid-review.

Between 5% and 12% of employees across North America and the UK say communication failures have directly created safety risks in their workplace.

That represents a persistent, recurring problem reported by the employees experiencing it. And it’s happening despite heavy communication efforts. Between 59% and 70% of workers across roles in North America, and the majority of UK workers, say they receive employer communications at least once a week. Yet 61% to 76% have missed an important policy or procedural update anyway.

For frontline workers, a missed communication can be especially impactful. Unlike office workers who can catch up on a missed email at their desk, frontline workers often encounter the hazard before they encounter the update. They're operating machinery, handling materials, and moving through physical environments where conditions change shift to shift.

The risk can be significant. For example, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the injury rate for warehousing and storage workers alone is 4.8 injuries per 100 workers, nearly twice the average of 2.7 per 100 across all U.S. private industry. In these environments, a missed safety announcement isn't an inconvenience. It's a direct exposure to risk that desk workers simply don't face.

Most organizations work hard on safety communication. They cascade updates through managers, post notices in break rooms, and send all-staff emails.

The effort is real, but the infrastructure keeps getting in the way.

Frontline workers are often structurally cut off from the channels most organizations use to share safety information. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), nearly half of HR professionals report moderate to extreme difficulty in reaching deskless workers. That factor can be seen impacting things across the organization:

• When critical safety updates travel only through email, they don't reach workers without access (54%) or time to log in before a shift starts.
• When managers are the primary relay point, communication quality becomes wildly inconsistent depending on the supervisor. Between 70-77% report challenges effectively reaching their team.
• When every message goes to every employee regardless of role or location, workers learn to ignore more because most of it doesn't apply to them.
• And when organizations track message sends instead of outcomes, they have no way of knowing whether the employee who needed the information actually received it and understood it.

For the industries most represented in this blog (manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, logistics), the latest federal data paints a stark picture.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2024 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, released in February 2026, recorded 5,070 fatal work injuries in the United States, meaning a worker died from a work-related injury roughly every two hours.

Manufacturing alone accounted for 355 of those deaths.

Transportation and warehousing had the highest nonfatal injury rate among major industries at 4.4 cases per 100 full-time workers, and 865 fatalities—a fatality rate of 12.2 per 100,000 workers.

Clearly, these are the environments where communication infrastructure failures are most consequential.

The human cost comes first. Always. But the business impact is impossible to ignore.

According to the National Safety Council’s latest study, the total cost of work injuries in the United States reached $181.4 billion, including $54.9 billion in wage and productivity losses and $36.8 billion in direct medical expenses.

OSHA data shows that a single serious violation can carry a maximum penalty of $16,550, with willful or repeated violations reaching $165,514 each.

Liberty Mutual's 2025 Workplace Safety Index found that employers pay more than $1 billion per week in direct workers' compensation costs for disabling, nonfatal injuries alone.

Behind every one of those numbers is an incident. Behind most incidents is a gap between what people needed to know and what actually reached them.

Watch this webinar to see how your peers are improving safety communication

Safety communication failures are costing organizations. Firstup research shows that up to 12% of hourly workers say poor communication has put their safety at risk. In this webinar, leaders from Polaris and Oatey share the specific strategies that moved them from "send and hope" to measurable reductions in compliance gaps and safety incidents.

Sources:

• Firstup, 2026 State of Employee Engagement Report – North America (survey of 3,093 U.S. and Canadian employees)
• National Safety Council, Injury Facts, 2024 – injuryfacts.nsc.org
• U.S. Department of Labor / OSHA, January 2025
• Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index, 2025, cited by OSHA.gov
• Gallup, "U.S. Worker Thriving Declines as Job Market Pessimism Grows", March 2026
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024 – bls.gov/iif