World Day for Safety and Health at Work

Every year on April 28, the International Labour Organisation marks World Day for Safety and Health at Work which is intended to be a global moment to pause, reflect, and ask ourselves some important questions: are we doing enough to protect our workforce? Are we getting the right advice? Are we building safety systems that actually make work safer – or are we just overcomplicating things?

This year’s theme feels especially timely, and definitely worth giving thought to:

“Revolutionising health and safety: the role of AI and digitalisation at work.”

While digital tools are definitely transforming the safety landscape by helping businesses capture data, respond to risks, and automate processes, there is a growing risk that we need to talk about. In the rush to modernise everything, we risk building systems that are very efficient, but are also very impersonal. Streamlined, but disconnected. Smart, but ultimately irrelevant to the people actually doing the work.

Tech won’t fix culture

There’s no question that AI, automation, and digital platforms have a place in a good safety management system. They allow us to spot patterns in incident data we might otherwise miss; they can show us high risk movements and trends in real-time, enable remote inspections, and make safety more accessible for mobile workers.

But here’s the issue: technology only works if people trust it.

A fancy real-time dashboard won’t fix a workplace where people are too afraid to report issues and events.

An automated alert system won’t help if follow up never happens and a mountain of compliance data (site audit anyone?) won’t protect anyone if the content is not being used to drive improvement decisions.

If technology feels more like surveillance than support, like AI watching your every move to predict risk, it can backfire before it even begins.

If your workforce doesn’t see the value in the system, or worse, if they feel like the system is a burden rather than a benefit, then it doesn’t matter how advanced the technology you use is. It’s not going to make your workplace safer.

The role of digital done well

At Engage, we work with businesses every day that are navigating this space; some just beginning their digital journey, others refining mature systems. What we’ve seen time and again is that digital tools can genuinely transform a safety culture when used with the right intent.

We’ve seen real-world benefits when technology is used to help businesses make better decisions rather than just collect data. For example, sensors that monitor air quality or equipment vibrations in high-risk environments can trigger early interventions before an incident occurs. Smart reporting tools allow workers to log a near miss directly from their phone in seconds – no paper, no delay. Machine learning models can highlight subtle patterns in safety observations that would otherwise go unnoticed.

But more than the tech itself, it’s the shift in mindset that makes the difference. When a business uses data not just to report on lagging indicators but to predict and prevent and when it removes barriers to workers speaking up and it genuinely listens to what is being said, then technology becomes a tool for empowerment, not just oversight.

So where to from here?

Whether you’ve already integrated AI into your safety systems or are still figuring out where to begin, the question isn’t “Should we go digital?” any more, the more important question is this:

How do we make sure our digital tools are helping us get our workers home safely.

For us at Engage, that’s always been the goal. We’re not interested in building tech for tech’s sake; we’re here to create tools that reduce admin, improve visibility, and most importantly, make it easier for workers to engage in safety conversations that matter.

We believe digital systems should support connection and communication, not remove it. They should open up access, not cause complexity. They should provide insight, not just display information. And above all, they should serve the real humans doing the real work, not just satisfy board reports!

Looking ahead

As we mark World Day for Safety and Health at Work this year, let’s take the opportunity to rethink what modern safety systems should look like. We should definitely investigate what AI can do and how it can assist but we must stay critical about how we use it. Let’s embrace the future without losing the humanity at the heart of it.

Because in the end, safety is not about software. It’s about people.

And the best systems, digital or otherwise, are the ones that never forget that.

To find out more about Engage and how it can assist your workplace, contact us today.