TheBureau of Labor Statistics reported 2.5 million injury and illness cases in private industry in 2024, down only slightly from the year before. The rules exist. Training programs run on schedule. And yet, most companies still treat workplace safety like a checkbox exercise. There’s a binder full of protocols in the break room, a poster on the wall reminding everyone to wear their hard hat, and a monthly email from HR that nobody reads. So why do the numbers stay stubbornly high?
The answer isn’t more regulations. It’s better visibility into what’s happening on the ground, and getting that information in front of the people who need it most: the workers themselves.
The Gap Between Policy and Awareness
Here’s what makes safety communication so tricky: people tune out static information. A laminated sign that’s been hanging in the same spot for three years becomes wallpaper. It blends into the background, and nobody processes it anymore. The same screen showing your morning KPIs can rotate into workplace accident tracking signage by midday and shift change announcements by 3 PM. That flexibility is one reason digital displays are replacing single-purpose boards in many facilities. When a screen in the hallway shows “47 days since our last incident,” that number carries weight. It’s specific, it’s current, and it creates a shared sense of responsibility that a dusty poster never could.
This approach taps into something psychologists call the salience effect: we pay more attention to information that feels immediate and personally relevant. A running count of accident-free days does exactly that. It turns an abstract concept (“be safe”) into a concrete, visible goal (“don’t break our streak”).
Data on Display Changes Behavior
The National Safety Council has flagged a persistent disconnect between safety leaders and frontline workers. Leaders tend to rate their organization’s safety culture more positively than the people doing the actual work. One of the reasons? Information doesn’t flow well in most workplaces. Safety metrics live in spreadsheets, dashboards, and management meetings. The workers on the warehouse floor or the manufacturing line rarely see those numbers.
Putting real-time safety data on screens throughout a facility closes that gap. When everyone, from the newest hire to the plant manager, sees the same numbers, it creates accountability that goes both ways. Workers feel like they’re being taken seriously. Management gets a visible reminder that these metrics matter beyond quarterly reports.
Making Safety Personal, Not Just Procedural
The “days since last accident” counter has stuck around for decades, even in low-tech environments, because it makes safety feel personal. Nobody wants to be the person who resets the counter to zero. That’s not shame; it’s collective ownership. A team that tracks its safety record together tends to look out for each other more actively.
Digital versions of this concept take it a step further. They can pull data directly from incident reporting systems, display department-level breakdowns, and update without anyone having to manually change a number on a whiteboard. Beyond incident streaks, these displays can rotate safety alerts, policy reminders, equipment inspection status, or shift-level metrics like near-miss counts. That flexibility removes the friction that often causes manual trackers to fall out of use. When updates happen automatically, the information stays accurate and people keep paying attention.
The Cybersecurity Angle Worth Taking Seriously
For a site like SquaringTheNet that covers data ethics and cybersecurity, there’s a practical wrinkle here. Any system that displays workplace data on networked screens introduces questions about data handling. Who can access incident records? How is that information stored and transmitted? Are employees’ names attached to incident reports displayed on public screens?
Networked displays are endpoints like any other device on the corporate network. Without proper access controls, firmware updates, and network segmentation, they widen the organization’s attack surface. A screen pulling data from an incident reporting API needs the same hardening you’d give any IoT device: encrypted connections, authentication, and monitoring for unauthorized access attempts.
Good implementations handle this thoughtfully. Screens show aggregate data (total days, incident counts) without identifying individuals. The underlying systems should follow the same data protection principles that apply to any workplace technology: access controls, encrypted connections, and clear policies about who sees what. OSHA’s own Injury Tracking Application, which collects data from hundreds of thousands of establishments, goes through a privacy review before making any information public. Workplace safety displays should follow that same logic.
What This Means Going Forward
Workplace safety has been stuck in a communication rut for a long time. The rules and training programs exist, but the bridge between knowing what’s safe and actively thinking about it throughout the day has been weak. Real-time, visible safety data changes that equation. It keeps safety in people’s line of sight, literally, and turns compliance from a background task into something the whole team owns.
The technology to do this is straightforward, and the barriers to making safety data visible are lower than ever. If the goal is fewer injuries, not just fewer citations, then getting that data out of the back office and onto the floor is one of the simplest moves a company can make.