In 2023, construction fatalities hit the highest number since 2011. This statistic demonstrates the need for a new approach to protecting workers. The industry has the opportunity to make 2025 a transformative year for safety.
It won’t be easy. This year, the construction industry will continue to struggle with a workforce shortage, creating a number of safety and operational challenges. However, new frameworks and technologies give organizations powerful ways to enhance their safety practices. Events that could have — but did not — result in a serious injury or fatality (SIF-p) should command more attention, and safety leaders can leverage AI-powered platforms for enhanced insight into emerging risks.
These changes can help the industry evolve beyond outdated approaches, combining cultural shifts and innovative technologies to better protect its workforce. Now is the time for action.
Tracking Events with Serious Injury and Fatality Potential (SIF-p)
Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) has long been a go-to metric for measuring performance and assessing risk in the construction industry. While the industry has successfully reduced recordable incident rates, the fatality rate has remained essentially flat over the last 15 years. This disparity has led the industry to recognize that focusing on recordable incidents, while valuable, does not paint a complete picture of risk.
Contractors can maintain a strong safety record, as demonstrated by a low recordable rate, yet still experience near misses and significant exposures that put workers at risk. While incidents like a minor cut requiring a few stitches are consistently investigated, the reality is that a more serious exposure, such as a worker using inadequate fall protection, is not.
Traditionally, site leadership corrects such exposures or near misses in the field but does not track or evaluate them with the same diligence as minor recordable incidents. Events with the potential to result in a serious injury or fatality represent a significant opportunity to learn, improve and reduce fatality rates over time.
2025 must bring an industry-wide shift in how we think about safety metrics and measure safety performance. Organizations should evaluate SIF-p events with the same level of attention as recordable incidents. By systematically tracking and investigating all SIF-p events, organizations can better understand the factors that contributed to the event, including the identification of opportunities to improve planning, training and execution. Leaders may also uncover gaps in programs and management systems.
The move to SIF-p tracking hinges on building a culture where workers feel empowered to report near misses and potential risks without fear of blame. Leaders must set the tone to make safety a shared responsibility across the organization. This requires creating an environment where workers recognize that reporting contributes to safety. Leaders can reinforce this message by acting on reports, sharing lessons learned and celebrating individuals and teams who speak up.
When workers understand that identifying these events can prevent serious injuries or fatalities, employee participation becomes a cornerstone of a proactive safety culture.
This approach enables organizations to begin aggregating data around SIF-p events, identifying emerging trends and taking action to reduce exposures and prevent serious incidents from occurring. This shift toward measuring and learning from SIF-p events represents a promising development in the ongoing effort to improve worker safety. Companies that successfully implement this new safety framework will reduce serious incidents, while those that rely on outdated approaches will continue to have exposures that threaten worker health and well-being.
Labor Shortage Presents Safety Challenges
The workforce shortage will emerge as a defining safety challenge of 2025, fundamentally testing the industry’s ability to deliver increasingly complex capital projects safely. According to the Associated General Contractors of America, over three-quarters of contractors face challenges filling open positions.
This labor shortage isn’t just about filling roles — it’s about retaining the knowledge and experience that keep job sites safe. Many project managers and superintendents are leaving the workforce, taking decades of expertise with them. Eight in 10 surveyed contractors believe the lack of skilled, experienced workers poses a safety risk. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reports that first-year employees accounted for nearly half of all construction injuries.
Additionally, staffing challenges can put pressure on teams as they work to meet aggressive deadlines, potentially at the expense of thorough onboarding and effective training. The quality of the work delivered can also suffer as a result of insufficient staffing and a lack of worker experience. The need to perform rework introduces and increases safety risks as schedule pressures increase, work environments change, and available resources potentially decrease.
To overcome these challenges, organizations must invest in building strong safety cultures that prioritize mentorship and training. Pairing inexperienced workers with seasoned professionals becomes a critical strategy for transferring knowledge and ensuring that new hires develop the ability to recognize hazards and understand how to take appropriate action.
As part of the safety culture, project teams must make responsible choices about the type and amount of work they take on in the face of this shortage. Companies must carefully consider their ability to staff each project with management, supervision and skilled workers.
By focusing on safety, training, employee onboarding and continued support, companies can build resilience and thrive even with reduced staffing and a less experienced workforce.
AI as a Catalyst for Safety Innovation
Experts forecast that AI in the construction market will more than quadruple by the end of the decade, from $2 billion to $8.4 billion. Using this technology in construction is primarily about improving processes, delivering actionable insights and enhancing decision-making. It supports human expertise rather than replacing it.
Worker safety, in particular, stands to significantly benefit from AI adoption. These tools support projects from preconstruction through project completion, including during on-site operations.
AI-powered solutions enhance contractor prequalification processes. AI can assess a contractor’s risk by analyzing many different data sources, including safety records, quality metrics, performance data and financial documents.
The technology’s value extends beyond analyzing lagging indicators. General contractors (GCs) and project owners can also evaluate leading indicators, including safety programs, safety management systems and behavioral data.
By automating the review of safety manuals, procedures and pre-task planning documents, AI empowers GCs and owners to efficiently identify gaps, assess quality and ensure compliance with standards. Safety teams can focus on engaging with potential contractors to address concerns using a collaborative risk mitigation approach. Knowing a partner’s strengths and weaknesses supports effective project planning.
AI is particularly valuable for continuous monitoring and risk assessment. Construction projects generate enormous amounts of data that can be difficult for project teams to effectively analyze while managing their day-to-day responsibilities. AI systems can monitor multiple data streams to identify risk patterns and alert teams to projects showing increased risk indicators.
As the construction industry adopts more AI tools, on-site inspection quality and value will improve. Traditional approaches to conducting inspections often fall short as inspectors fail to focus on the most critical risks. Inspections done solely by human inspectors are limited by time, resources and the sheer scale of dynamic job sites.
AI-powered systems that continuously record job site data — from worker movement patterns and equipment usage logs to environmental sensors and incident reports — can identify patterns, unsafe conditions or deviations from safety protocols that might escape human observation. When project teams begin their day with AI-generated insights, inspectors will be directed toward the most relevant risks, ensuring their expertise is applied where it matters most. The real-time nature of this data enables a proactive safety approach and continuous improvement throughout the project lifecycle.
While technology can identify a hazard, it’s the human interactions — like addressing unsafe behaviors, implementing controls, communicating processes or praising workers for a job well done — that improve safety. No matter how advanced technology gets, effective safety programs require human leadership.
The Future of Construction Safety
As 2025 unfolds, successful companies will recognize safety as more than a compliance metric; they will see it as an opportunity to innovate, lead and protect. By addressing workforce challenges through a safety-focused culture, adopting SIF-p tracking and leveraging AI, the construction industry can enhance project success while building a safer future for its workers.
