Safety Must Be Inclusive: How Organizational Safety Is Impacted Without DEI

Safety Must Be Inclusive: How Organizational Safety Is Impacted Without DEI

Safety is not political; safety is a non-negotiable and inalienable right. At the 2025 NSC The Future of EHS event, NSC President and CEO Lorraine Martin made it clear that ensuring worker safety goes above and beyond any political considerations or grandstanding. DEI has been a major target in the latest round of cuts and rhetoric from the Trump administration. Despite raging arguments about the costs, value and ethics of DEI programmes, people largely ignore a major component of their impact: safety.

Recent research from the NSC demonstrates the direct impact that strong DEI policies have on worker health and safety. Non-equitable safety programmes are bound to fail, as individual workers need specific considerations in work-task development, technology application and administrative controls. For example, work hours and activities can have different impacts on different individuals based on gender, body composition and age. Enforcing broad stroke policies can lead to uneven levels of musculoskeletal and psychosocial risks for some individuals, resulting in higher rates of LTIs or SIFs.

Employees in non-inclusive workplaces exhibit higher levels of apathy and disengagement. The flipside of this is true, too. According to research from Deloitte, 83% of millennial workers feel engaged if their employer or worksite is considered inclusive. At the NSC Future of EHS event, a poll of 75 attendees found that nearly 70% struggle to build safety culture within their organization. It would lend itself to be true, then, that if you are unable to develop a safety programme that is inclusive and equitable, you risk alienating workers and harming safety culture.

EHS itself has become increasingly presented as a collaborative function that engages stakeholders across business units. Safety outcomes can benefit from having a diverse set of voices contributing to EHS programmes. Different viewpoints, experiences, backgrounds and expertise allow for multiple perspectives of the same problem. While you may look at an issue 100 times and see the same problem, someone from a different background may see the issue once and find a solution. Fostering diversity in EHS projects can help build better thinking, align human-centric workflows and benefit technology implementation.

So, while political institutes may argue the value of DEI, one thing is abundantly clear. Safety is a non-negotiable. And DEI is an essential component in ensuring safety programmes are effective. Because when safety is equitable in an organization, the workers, firm and community all win.

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