When ISN surveyed more than 400,000 employees and contractors across five industries to assess the maturity of their companies’ safety cultures, the oil and gas industry earned the top score. It came in at 80.7, slightly above the utilities sector, which rated 79.7.

The remaining three sectors ISN considered were only slightly behind, with heavy manufacturing at 77.9, light manufacturing at 77.3, and the chemical industry at 77.1, ISN reports.

Across all sectors, the survey determined that contractors had a more positive perception of their clients’ safety cultures than employees did. For example, in oil and gas, contractors' responses put the safety culture score at 81.5, 1.4 points higher than employees. ISN, which has provided a platform for managing contractors and suppliers since 2001, attributes employees’ lower scores to their involvement in day-to-day operations, greater exposure to incident reporting, and heightened expectations.

Safety culture can improve with effort. ISN says the utilities industry saw the largest improvement in frontline employee perceptions from 2024 to 2025, with a gain of 3.2 points.

Psychological Safety

To prevent serious injuries and fatalities, ISN says many organizations are trying to build cultures with high psychological safety and develop systems that allow them to determine where the potential for SIFs exists. “The underlying premise of this philosophy is humans inevitably make mistakes, so systems and processes should be introduced that help minimize the severity of these mistakes when they occur,” ISN notes.

To promote psychological safety, ISN notes that many organizations adopt the five principles of human and organizational performance:

• People make mistakes.
• Blame fixes nothing.
• Context drives behavior.
• Learning is vital.
• Leadership responses matter.

When companies that embrace these principles learn of an incident or near-miss, they focus on identifying the contextual factors that made it more likely to occur rather than assigning blame. The goal is to learn from the event and evaluate ways to minimize the chance of a repeat occurrence.

“The lowest-scoring topic across all industries is ‘blame fixes nothing,’” ISN reports. “Organizations that are scoring well in this area are reserving blame and judgement so their workers feel psychologically safe enough to report incidents.”

Employee Feedback

As part of its survey, ISN notes it collected more than 16,000 free-text responses from frontline employees about the likelihood of a serious injury or fatality occurring. According to the company, these comments stress that SIFs are more likely to occur when:

• People are assigned tasks they do not have the training or experience to perform safely;
• Equipment is outdated, improperly maintained, or past its service life; or
• Management “prioritizes production and cost over safety, leading to a lack of accountability and enforcement of safety protocols.”

To minimize SIFs, ISN says workers encouraged companies to:

• “Ensure adequate training for all employees, especially new hires, and maintain consistent supervision to prevent accidents due to inexperience or lack of knowledge;
• Hold employees accountable for non-compliance to safety protocols prevent incidents caused by negligence or shortcuts; and
• Improve communication between management and employees regarding safety concerns ensuring timely action is taken on reported issues.”

Stronger Metrics

In addition to championing psychological safety, ISN says modern safety managers increasingly look beyond total recordable incident rates. While TRIR has fallen across industries, that has not led to a meaningful reduction in SIFs.

“The stagnation of SIF rates over the past 20 years serves as a reminder to health and safety professionals there is still improvement needed,” ISN writes. “Across all industries, there is a glaring need to shift from a zero-injury mindset to pursue data-driven strategies and systems that address SIFs directly. This includes documenting SIF and Potential SIF events to more effectively learn from past events and focus on the presence of controls.”

To support data-driven mitigation, ISN applied the Energy-Based Safety framework to SIFs reported in Occupational Safety and Health Administration logs between 2022 and 2024. “Energy-Based Safety has emerged as one of the leading initiatives among health and safety professionals, and its principals focus on understanding and controlling energy sources that can cause harm,” ISN describes.

Across all industries, motion and gravity were the most prominent causes of SIFs in the OSHA logs, with motion accounting for 39% and gravity contributing to 36.5%. For fatalities, motion’s share rose to 58.6% and gravity’s fell to 23.2%.

ISN breaks the motion category into four subcategories:

• Moving vehicles, which caused 70% of all fatalities resulting from motion;
• Humans in motion, which covers events such as muscle tears from lifting heavy objects or performing repetitive motions;
• Materials in motion, which includes situations where employees are struck or caught between pipes, hoses, and other equipment; and
• Mobile equipment, including incidents where people are in the line of fire of forklifts, scissor lifts, pallet jacks, and similar equipment.

The gravity category includes three subcategories. In order of significance, they are falls from the same height (47.6% of SIFs within the category), falls from heights (33.2%), and falling objects (the remaining 19.2%).

When ISN zoomed in on 2,400 fatality investigation summaries OSHA produced from 2022-2024, motion and gravity again emerged as the top culprits. For the 81 fatalities within the mining and oil and gas extraction sector, motion accounted for 29.3% and gravity for 20.7%, followed by pressure at 19.5%.

“A key component of Energy-Based Safety is the implementation of direct controls designed to target specific high-energy hazards and build resilience within operational systems,” ISN says. “These direct controls advance the principles of the Hierarchy of Controls by focusing specifically on SIF prevention.”

To illustrate this concept, ISN offers several examples of controls. To prevent motion-related hazards, companies might designate specific traffic flow patterns and install barriers to separate mobile equipment from workers. “For gravity-related hazards, direct controls may include properly functioning fall arrest systems, appropriate rigging equipment, and drop zone barriers to prevent injuries from falling objects,” it says.

Recent Progress

In addition to looking at OSHA data, ISN used AI to analyze incident reports filed on its platform between 2017 and 2024. Noting that more than 62,000 U.S. contractors use the platform to report incidents each year, the company says that 4,000 contractors reported at least one SIF across that eight-year time span.

From 2023 to 2024, the number of contractors who reported a SIF dropped from more than 1,000 in 2023 to 705 in 2024, ISN adds.

These numbers are based on OSHA’s definition of SIFs, which includes any event that leads to work-related fatalities, in-patient hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye. When ISN applied the ASTM framework, which considers a broader range of life-altering injuries, significant signs of progress remained. “In 2024, 3,170 Level One injuries were identified, nearly doubling the number of SIFs meeting the OSHA definition,” ISN writes. “However, this total was 11% lower than 2023 (3,567 injuries) and 28% lower than 2022 (4,382 injuries).”

The information above comes from an ISN white paper that also includes more details on Energy-Based Safety, a cross-industry look at the types of injuries that occur and their causes, and next steps for minimizing SIFs. You can request a copy at Serious Injury & Fatality Insights: New Analyses to Improve Understanding of SIFs and Support Prevention Efforts.

Some of the next steps the paper recommends relate to building strong safety cultures. To access ISN’s recent safety culture survey, see Leveraging Data to Transform Safety Culture.