Key takeaways

• Safety policies and safety software tend to fail the same way. They’re built for the people who write and review them, and the crews who use them come second.
• Safety clutter is safety work that doesn’t make the job any safer. It usually comes from how a policy or activity is designed and delivered.
• Good field data depends on good design. Slow or confusing forms lead to pencil whipping, and new research suggests checklist design matters more than how carefully people fill them out.
• Every new app or rule competes for the foreman’s attention, and distracted workers spot fewer hazards.
• Human-oriented safety starts with how work is actually done. It means removing something before adding something, capturing information once, and using the crew’s language.

Design with the Frontline in Mind

There’s a picture I keep coming back to when I think about safety in the field. A foreman is starting a shift in jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, a hard hat, a high-visibility vest, and a heavy leather tool pouch with a radio clipped on somewhere. They’re already carrying several pounds of gear before the first task begins.

The morning starts with a crew huddle about the day’s work and the hazards that come with it. Someone heads to the gang box for permit forms. The foreman fills them out on a clipboard and tracks down the superintendent for a signature. Then someone asks them to enter the same information into an app on a tablet.

Conditions usually change by late morning. The foreman checks in with the crew and then has to pull the tablet back out and dig through a list view to find the plan they started that morning. All of this sits on top of the foreman’s actual job, which might be getting a trench from point A to point B in three days with a small crew and a superintendent calling every hour.

Every step in that morning is driven by a safety policy or a piece of safety software, and often both. Each one was added for a good reason. Very few of them were designed with the foreman in the room.

I believe safety policies and safety software tend to fail in the same way. They get designed for the people who write and review them, and the crews carrying them out become an afterthought. Human-oriented design means building both around how work actually happens on a jobsite.

What human-oriented design means

The software world has a formal definition. The National Institute of Standards and Technology cites a standard from the International Organization for Standardization, ISO 9241-210, which describes human-centered design as an approach that makes systems usable and useful by focusing on the people who use them and what they need. The same definition says this approach can counteract harmful effects on health and safety. The standard’s first principle is that design should be based on an explicit understanding of users, tasks, and environments.

Safety science has a parallel idea. Human and Organizational Performance builds on the Department of Energy’s human performance research and treats human error as normal. It looks at the systems and conditions surrounding people’s actions instead of stopping at the individual. Safety researchers also describe a gap between work as imagined, which is how a task looks on paper, and work as done, which is how it actually happens in the field.

I think of a safety policy as a design. It has users, and it either fits the way they work or it doesn’t. The same is true of every form and app we hand to a crew.

Safety policies built for the office

Most safety professionals know the hierarchy of controls. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health ranks administrative controls, like procedures and training, near the bottom. Only personal protective equipment ranks lower. NIOSH explains that the top three are more effective because they control exposures without significant human interaction. Policies depend on people far more than engineering controls do.

The first lesson from the hierarchy is to design hazards out wherever possible. The second is that the policies left over need to fit the people expected to follow them, because those policies only work when people can actually carry them out.

Safety researchers have a name for what happens when that fit breaks down. Drew Rae, David Provan, and their colleagues define safety clutter as procedures, documents, roles, and activities performed in the name of safety that don’t make operational work any safer. Their 2018 paper argued that clutter breeds cynicism and surface-level compliance and gets in the way of the work itself. They traced it to duplication, generalization, and over-specification, along with a simple imbalance: adding a safety activity is easy, and removing one is hard.

A 2026 study from the Construction Safety Research Alliance at the University of Colorado Boulder took the idea onto active jobsites. Researchers ran expert focus groups and followed crews for full shifts on 11 sites. The researchers found that clutter usually lives in how an activity is designed and delivered, not in the activity itself. A pre-job brief can turn into clutter through the way it’s built or repeated, even when the brief itself is worthwhile. One field leader in the study put the cost plainly: “I waste a lot of time, and it does not let me be onsite.” The authors argue that clutter eats up capacity that could go toward preventing serious injuries and fatalities. They also note that a direct causal link still needs more evidence.

Contractors are seeing the same thing. The American Society of Safety Professionals and J. J. Keller surveyed more than 700 construction professionals for their 2025 Construction Industry Safety Challenges report. One of the six key challenges they identified was workers viewing safety protocols as red tape instead of real protection. The report also found that language barriers and fear of speaking up get in the way of communication, and that finding time for training is a persistent struggle.

Language deserves its own attention. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires employers to train workers in a language and vocabulary they understand. Hispanic workers make up about 32% of the construction workforce nationally and more than half of it in New Mexico, Texas, California, and Nevada, according to the National Association of Home Builders. A procedure written only in English at an office reading level leaves out a big share of the people expected to follow it.

My test for any new rule is simple. Someone should ask what it requires of the foreman at 10 a.m., in the middle of the work, with a crew waiting.

Safety software built for the dashboard

Software has its own version of this problem. Most safety platforms are designed around the dashboard. Someone in the office wants to see trends and open corrective actions, so the product gets built to serve that view. The data entry side, where a foreman or crew lead actually puts information into the system, gets treated as an afterthought.

I understand why it happens, because the person buying safety software is usually the person reading the reports. Research outside construction shows how wide that gap can get. A Humanforce survey of Australian workplaces found that 66% of decision-makers were satisfied with their human resources tools, compared with 44% of frontline workers. A third of the frontline workers surveyed had limited mobile access to the tools they needed.

The CSRA clutter study found the same pattern in construction software. Participants described an online job hazard analysis that took 45 minutes to complete because the system was confusing and full of steps that didn’t apply to their work. Others described pre-job forms packed with so many low-value checkboxes that serious risks got lost, an observation app that failed on site because of permissions and weak connectivity, and near-miss reports that piled up without anyone reading them. Each of those is a design problem.

The ASSP and J. J. Keller report points in the same direction. It found that budget limits and cultural resistance hold back safety technology, along with trouble connecting new tools to existing systems. It also found that 20% of respondents weren’t confident their safety technology was supported by strong data.

That lack of confidence makes sense, because field data quality depends on design. When entry is slow or confusing, people find shortcuts, like copying yesterday’s entry or filling everything out from memory at the end of the shift. The industry calls this pencil whipping, which means completing a safety checklist without doing the work behind it, such as marking every item “safe.” The dashboard still looks complete, and that’s what makes it dangerous, because the data looks trustworthy when it isn’t.

Emerging research suggests the form itself makes a real difference. A 2025 master’s thesis at Appalachian State University found that observation checklists with stronger design, including sharper items and more room for free-text responses, were more effective at reducing incidents. How carefully people filled out the checklists had no significant effect. The design of the tool mattered more than the diligence of the person using it.

When policy and software land on the same person

The foreman from the opening carries both burdens at once. A policy requires documentation, the software requires entry, and the foreman ends up doing the work twice, first on paper and then on a tablet.

Each layer costs attention, and attention is a safety resource. A 2018 study in the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management tested 70 construction workers and found that distracted workers recognized a smaller share of hazards than undistracted workers. The authors specifically warned contractors bringing mobile devices and other new technology onto jobsites to consider their distracting effects.

That warning matters more given how many hazards already go unrecognized. Research led by Alex Albert, which studied 287 workers across 57 U.S. construction workplaces, notes that workers fail to recognize a large number of hazards. It cites an Australian study that put the figure as high as 57%.

The problem shows up well beyond construction. Quinyx surveyed 13,000 deskless workers and found that one in three use five or more work apps every day. A third said those apps don’t help them, and 22% said the tools frustrate them, mostly because they aren’t user friendly.

Screen size adds another layer. A superintendent checking the schedule on a phone can see that the project is two weeks behind, but it’s hard to see where the slip started. A week later the project is eight weeks behind, and the cause is buried in details nobody could see from the field. Field screens need to answer the specific question the person in the field is asking.

Principles for human-oriented safety

These principles apply to a new procedure as much as a new piece of software.

Start with work as done

ISO calls for involving users throughout design and development. Writing a permit process or building a new feature should start with watching the work and asking the people who do it, and they should stay involved until it’s finished.

Remove something before adding something

Safety clutter grows because additions are easy and removals are rare. Every new requirement should come with a review of what it replaces.

Capture information once

One entry should satisfy the policy and the software. Asking a foreman to fill out paper and then retype it into an app doubles the effort and creates another chance for errors.

Use the crew’s language

That means forms in the languages your crews speak and voice entry for people whose hands are full. A foreman should be able to update a Pre-Task Plan by voice, in Spanish, during the walk between tasks. Our team at Safety Mojo designed around that scenario because it matches how crews actually work.

Reduce how much people have to think about

Albert’s 2020 research argued that traditional hazard recognition tools were designed without a proper understanding of the challenges workers face. Earlier CSRA research found that a hazard identification board built around energy-source cues helped workers spot and communicate hazards in real time with much less mental effort. Good design does some of the thinking for the user.

Test in real conditions with first-time users

A new hire who has never seen the form will get stuck anywhere the design is confusing. That makes them the best tester you have, whether you’re rolling out a procedure or an app.

Give the foreman something back

Crews stop putting care into data that disappears into a system they never see again. When the information they enter comes back as something useful, like a clearer plan for tomorrow or a heads-up about a nearby hazard, entering it becomes part of the job.

Why this matters now

OSHA launched a National Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention Alliance in September, and the industry is moving toward finding and controlling the high-energy hazards behind the worst outcomes. That shift needs policies lean enough to leave room for prevention work. It also needs tools simple enough that crews will record what they actually see during the shift.

Safety programs are full of good intentions, and every rule and app was added to protect someone. Human-oriented design asks one more question before anything new reaches the field: does it fit the person who has to carry it out? I believe the quality of a safety program gets decided at the moment of capture, by the person with the least time to give.

If you want to see what field-first design looks like in a real workflow, you can schedule a Safety Mojo demo and walk through a Pre-Task Plan the way a foreman would complete it on the jobsite.