Podcast: A new approach to reducing serious injuries and fatalities

Traditional safety metrics often miss the human factors contributing to serious harm, emphasizing the need for human-centric approaches that address stress, fatigue, and psychological risks. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, you'll hear why Jonathan English, CEO of Evotix, believes that 2026 is the time for a complete system rebuild to help companies reach meaningful SIF reduction.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

Despite decades of effort, serious injury & fatality (SIF) rates remain alarmingly steady. This isn’t from a lack of commitment but a misalignment in how risk is defined, measured and managed. A unique opportunity to radically reduce SIFs is emerging, but it will require a system rebuild, not more add-ons. 

When We Disagree What Serious Means. While basic compliance and incident-prevention programs have driven down minor-incident rates in past decades, traditional safety efforts have yielded diminishing returns on serious work injuries. The good news is that organizations are now pushing beyond compliance checklists to focus on life-altering harm. According to the Risk Recalibrated: the 2026 Executive Leadership Report, 80% of responding organizations have SIF prevention programs in place. But the lack of universal acceptance of what constitutes a SIF is a problem.

SIF definitions vary not only across companies but sometimes within them. Some might restrict SIFs to immediate, high-severity physical trauma, while others include long illnesses or psychological trauma—to cite two common examples. These widely varying definitions lead to inconsistent classifications, uneven data, complications in operational benchmarking and therefore, confused priorities. Nearly 1 in 5 EHS leaders say traditional safety metrics have no relation to real risk, and more than half say they only partially reflect SIF drivers.

This misalignment results in critical risk exposure and a disconnect between executives, EHS teams and frontline workers, which only perpetuates the problem. To make meaningful progress in reducing serious harm, alignment may not require a universal definition, but it does demand internal clarity. The first step in lowering SIF rates is for organizations to adopt their own definitions. You can start this process by convening key, cross-functional stakeholders, including safety teams, operations leaders and HR, to define SIF clearly across the organization. 

Serious Harm Rarely Starts with a Single Incident. Even with aligned definitions, organizations will still struggle to reduce serious harm if what they measure is disconnected from how harm forms. 

Traditional safety strategies focus heavily on achieving compliance and tracking errors. This approach fails to deliver real improvement in SIF rates because serious harm rarely starts with a single unsafe act. More often, it starts with someone working under pressure. All people face real-world pressure, like stress, fatigue, burnout, grief and literacy/language barriers, and coping mechanisms vary. Conventional indicators miss this reality entirely.

Human-centric workplaces rely on strategies that prioritize employee well-being and flexibility and encourage design processes and workflows that account for everyday human pressures. Blending these strategies with EHS will provide a greater understanding of potential serious injury or fatality (PSIF), and the data show that organizations are increasingly acknowledging this, calling out control of work conditions (71%), mental health strain (66%), and fatigue (60%) as indicators. But recognition is outpacing integration. Most (89%) say the human-factor contributors are not yet integrated into safety or SIF strategies.