Safety, Tech, and the Language of Business

There's an emerging capability in safety leadership that we can no longer afford to overlook.

It's the ability to move fluidly between operational reality and technical delivery, and to speak both languages clearly enough that what gets built actually matches what work needs.

As safety professionals we've always operated across boundaries. We work with operations, legal, technical teams, and the C-suite. We translate what people are trying to achieve into systems and processes that function in the real world. But this "middle space" between safety and technology isn’t just valuable anymore. It's becoming critical. And it's often the difference between "we implemented software" and "work actually improved."

What Leaders Are Really Asking For

I've spent over a decade working in both worlds, as a Principal Safety Consultant across various industries, and now as Product Manager at Safety Champion. Something important I’ve learned is that when a business leader asks for a dashboard, they're usually asking for confidence. Confidence that they can see the real risks. That controls are working. That they won't be blindsided.

The thing is, confidence doesn't come from prettier charts or more data visualisations. It comes from shared meaning and consistency.

When different teams interpret the same request differently, systems get built on assumptions. People enter data with good intent, but it drifts over time. Reporting loses credibility. Workflows get bypassed. Leaders ask for more reporting, and the system becomes heavier instead of clearer, and we're left wondering why nobody's using it.

So when someone asks me for reporting, I go back to the fundamentals: What decision are you trying to make, and what information do we need to trust in order to make it?

A Real Example: When Risk Scores Don't Tell the Story

One organisation I worked with wanted incident reporting that ranked events by risk score. The intention was solid. They wanted to understand exposure and focus attention where it mattered most.

When we looked closely, we found a cluster of forklift incidents, including near misses involving pedestrians. What stood out was the variation in how similar events were being scored. With high labour turnover typical across their sites, scoring had become inconsistent. The reporting wasn't reliably surfacing critical exposure.

Once we clarified the outcome leaders actually needed, the solution became clearer. We adjusted reporting and escalation pathways to focus on critical risk categories and exposure patterns, rather than relying on individual risk scores alone. That gave the business stronger oversight and helped identify high-risk zones through trends, not just through whoever happened to be entering data that week.

This is the value safety professionals bring: taking a request like "show us the high risks" and turning it into definitions, workflows, and escalation processes that hold up across different sites, different people, and different circumstances.

Why Digital Transformation Alone Isn't Enough

Clarity around language and implementation is what drives successful adoption of digital safety systems.

I've seen organisations copy a paper process into a digital form and expect better outcomes. Sometimes it works. Often, it just accelerates the same issues, now with notifications.

The stronger approach is to design for real work:

·         What does "good" look like on a busy day at site?

·         What happens when data is missing, or people are under pressure?

·         What's simple enough to follow when it matters most, not just when conditions are ideal?

This is where safety professionals add enormous value to technology projects. We're trained to think about failure points, consequences, and what makes a control reliable under actual operating conditions. We understand the difference between "what should happen" and "what does happen when the supervisor's off sick and there's a deadline."

Building Capability Beyond Software

At Safety Champion, we're deliberate about building capability alongside technology, and challenging the status quo.

Our team includes experienced safety and risk professionals, many of them women with real operational backgrounds across Australian industry, who support clients in that middle space. They help align reporting requirements, workflow design, and adoption strategies so the system becomes usable, trusted, and consistent across the organisation.

The truth is that technology will only ever be as good as the thinking that goes into it.

The Translation Work That Changes Everything

When safety teams step into the middle and do this translation work, between what the business needs, what operations can sustain, and what technology can deliver, safety stops feeling like a blocker. It becomes what it should be: an essential part of business performance.

This is the skill set Australian safety leaders need to cultivate. The ability to bridge both technical knowledge and operational experience. To ask the right questions. To push back on assumptions. To design systems that work for people under pressure.

Ultimately, that's what keeps people safe.

Janelle Corbett

Principal Consultant & Product Manager

Safety Champion Software & Action OHS Consulting

Who is Safety Champion Software? We believe that embedding strong and sustainable workplace health and safety practices shouldn’t be hard; it must be easy. This belief led to our creation in 2014 when a team of experienced safety consultants in Melbourne set out to make safety simpler, smarter, and more accessible for businesses of all sizes, in every industry, no matter their safety expertise. 

What started as an aspiration has become a warranty to provide easy-to-manage, cost-effective, and custom safety programs. Safety Champion empowers organisations to integrate compliance seamlessly into their daily operations efficiently, ensuring they succeed in their safety journey.