September 29, 2026
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On 24 September, at Palácio Rosa, in Lisbon, the EHSQ Executive Brief brought together safety professionals around a hard challenge, that of moving from merely following the rules to a real safety culture in high-risk industries. The starting point was an idea shared by almost everyone in the room, that most organisations have already digitalised their processes, keep their indicators up to date and pass demanding audits, and serious accidents still keep happening.
Seen this way, legal compliance is the minimum threshold, and culture is what gets built on top of it. Throughout the session, operational leaders and specialists sketched out the concrete paths towards that shift, between reading the data, developing people and drawing lessons from other high-risk sectors.
The event opened with Nuno Santos, of dss+ Consulting, who offered a direct diagnosis of the maturity of industrial safety, drawing on the dss+360 benchmark. This picture brings together more than 20 million records gathered over twelve years across 296 companies in seven high-risk sectors.
The data reveal an uncomfortable asymmetry in the daily life of factories, because organisations record in detail what they see best and leave out the less visible signals, which are precisely the ones that kill the most. Same-level falls, for instance, account for around a quarter of all observations made in the field, yet correspond to just 3% of deaths, whereas the risks tied to vehicles and mobile equipment are among the least observed, despite leading the causes of fatal accidents.
The central challenge Nuno Santos left behind captures what is at stake, that of trading the counting of what can be seen for the reading of the signals that can kill, or in his own words, «Stop counting what you can see. Start reading what can kill.» Deep down, everyone has a story about something that almost happened, and the difference lies in creating the space to hear it rather than piling up observations that no one ever analyses. It is from that space that the chance arises to stop the next accident before it happens, and not merely to explain it afterwards.
This shift in focus, from metrics to real behaviour, was explored in depth in the round table moderated by Matilde Rodrigues, a lecturer at the School of Health of the Porto Polytechnic (E2S). The panel insisted on the need to break down the silos between functions, so that dealing with a near miss comes to involve the whole company and not just the safety department.
Elsa Ribeiros, of Calb Group, stressed that frontline workers should not be seen as mere recipients of training, and, acknowledging the progress made over the past two decades, argued that cultural maturity means trusting those on the ground and giving them room to guide and influence their peers.
Manuel Gonçalves, of Altri, offered proof from experience, describing how widening incident analysis to the various departments, and not only the safety team, brought the weight of the human factor down from more than 80% to around 40%. When that involvement lost its continuity, however, the indicator quickly rose again, a sign that mobilising everyone requires constancy and cannot be a one-off effort.
Along the same lines, Jayne D'Silva, of OpenSesame, recalled that generic training, designed to meet a requirement every now and then, changes little in behaviour, and that what makes the difference is learning tied to each person's actual task and built with those on the ground, not merely for them.
Howard Harvey, of 3E, was keen to separate the volume of data from its quality, noting that a sound decision does not come from the quantity of records stored, but from the ability to find and use the right data at the moment they are needed.
The problem for many organisations is not a shortage of records, it is the difficulty of organising and interpreting them, which is why dashboards full of charts and lengthy reports give a sense of control that falls apart when a real incident occurs. What protects those on the ground is the speed with which an important piece of data turns into action.
The maturity of a safety culture is also measured by the attention paid to those who work far from colleagues and supervisors. Duarte Dias, of INESC-TEC, presented s2IO, a project developed with Glartek and designed to protect those operating in isolation, bringing together indoor and outdoor location, automatic fall detection and immediate calls for help to shorten the time between an accident and the response, the most critical distance of all.
No sector has turned human error into learning the way civil aviation has, and it was José Correia Guedes, an author and former commercial pilot, who showed just how far that path can go.
That discipline was born of tragedies, most notably the Tenerife disaster of 1977, which forced the sector to rethink the way crews communicate and decide under pressure. From it came practices that are now indispensable, such as standardised communication in which every instruction is confirmed and nothing is left to individual interpretation, a lower authority gradient that gives any crew member the duty to challenge an unsafe manoeuvre, and the recognition of fatigue as a risk to be taken seriously.
The most transformative lesson for industry, however, is that of the non-punitive culture, one in which owning up to your own mistake is welcomed as a way to strengthen the system and not as grounds for punishment. It is that absence of blame that explains why, in aviation, almost nothing goes unreported, and it is its lack that keeps so many near misses untold on the factory floor and across the rest of the industrial field. Overcoming that fear is the step still missing for near misses to stop being secrets and start guiding the improvement of the whole organisation.
The message that ran through the entire EHSQ Executive Brief is a simple one, that moving from following the rules to a living safety culture depends on the willingness to listen to those who do the work.
Creating an environment where people flag risks without fear of reprisal, and turning those contributions into concrete action, is the foundation of that shift. It is in that space of mutual trust and shared rigour that protecting those who work stops being a matter of ticking compliance boxes.
See how it helps you move from meeting requirements to a living safety culture
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