Safety and health at work 2026: what a good risk assessment covers
A load lifted over someone's head. A circuit that was switched off, but not by the person now working on it. A hose still under pressure after the pump was shut down. A vehicle reversing in a yard where somebody is walking.
Four ordinary situations. In each one, the thing that can cause harm is a form of energy: gravity, electricity, pressure or motion. Few of us think about a working day this way, and that is exactly why it matters. Serious incidents rarely involve a hazard nobody knew about. More often, they involve energy that was familiar enough to stop being noticed.
That is the focus of Safety Week 2026, running from 5 to 9 October. This year, we introduce the Energy Wheel as a practical prompt to help colleagues recognize energy sources before work starts, especially during the Last-Minute Risk Assessment.
In this article, Ellen de Geest, Global Head of Health & Safety at Kiwa, shares why hazard recognition deserves attention and how we are turning a proven safety concept into something people can use in everyday work.
The Energy Wheel is not an extra safety activity. It is a science based way to make our LMRA stronger, helping colleagues pause, look more broadly and see the energy sources that may otherwise be missed.
Safety that starts from within
As a global testing, inspection and certification company, our work is bound up with safety. Our 12,000 specialists inspect construction sites, test products before they reach consumers, and certify the management systems other organizations rely on. Our people work in the same environments as our clients, on site, in the laboratory and on the road, and the practices we use to keep them safe are ones we understand from the inside.
Within our Safe Together framework, tools such as the Power to STOP, the Last-Minute Risk Assessment and the Life-Saving Rules already help colleagues make safer choices every day. This year, we are adding the Energy Wheel to strengthen those moments. It gives teams a simple way to look again at the task in front of them and ask: which energy sources are present, and have we controlled them well enough?
A good safety tool supports the way people actually work. It helps them pause at the right moment, notice what may otherwise be missed, and choose the safe next step without adding complexity.
At Kiwa, safety is part of how we deliver quality and trust. It is not separate from our work, it is how we make our work reliable.
Why we miss what is in front of us
Research gives a clear picture of how good people are at spotting hazards, and it is humbling. In field studies of construction crews in North America (Hallowell, 2021), workers identified around 45 percent of the hazards they went on to face during the work period. Which hazards were missed followed a consistent pattern, regardless of trade, experience or education. Hazards involving gravity and motion, a suspended load, a moving vehicle, an uneven surface, were the ones identified most readily. Hazards involving mechanical, pressure, chemical and temperature energy were routinely overlooked.
Brain imaging research suggests why. Gravity and motion hazards are processed instinctively, with little cognitive effort. The hazards we commonly miss require deliberate, effortful thinking, and the brain economizes by focusing on the ones that come easily. What was once labeled complacency looks, on the evidence, like a predictable feature of how people perceive risk.
The Energy Wheel
This is the thinking behind the Energy Wheel, the tool at the center of our Safety Week. It organizes hazards into 10 sources of energy: gravity, motion, mechanical, electrical, sound, pressure, temperature, chemical, radiation and biological. Used in a pre-job conversation or a Last-Minute Risk Assessment, it acts as a set of reminders to scan for the hazards that instinct and experience can pass over.
Research shows why this matters. In pre-job briefings, workers identify only around 45 percent of the hazards they will face during the work period. Field experiments show that using the Energy Wheel can improve hazard recognition by approximately 30 percent. Its strength is not that it replaces knowledge or experience. Its strength is that it gives people a simple prompt to look one more time, more broadly and more deliberately.
The research is clear: people more easily recognize hazards they can see or hear, such as movement or gravity. A structured prompt helps us also notice less obvious energy sources.
Making it part of everyday conversations
During Safety Week, we will also introduce our renewed Safety Walk approach. Leaders will be able to choose a focus area that fits the activity they are visiting, making the walks more relevant for the wide variety of work across Kiwa. One of these focus areas is the Energy Wheel, which helps leaders and teams look together at the energy sources present in the task and the controls needed to manage them. The aim is to create more conversations, stronger learning and practical follow-up, while keeping the process simple.
We are also using an Energy Wheel Bingo during Safety Week to make the launch fun and easy to join. Colleagues will be invited to spot energy sources in their own workplace and share what they find. It is a light, engaging way to start using the Energy Wheel, learn from each other and build a shared safety language across Kiwa.
What we bring to our clients
Our people face the same hazards our clients face, and the way we manage them inside Kiwa informs how we support organizations outside it. Our safety-related services include:
Product testing and certification
Construction safety services
Fire safety
Safety management system certification
Management system certification is where hazard recognition and organizational structure meet. ISO 45001 includes explicit requirements for worker consultation and participation. Organizations that treat it as documentation get documentation. Organizations that treat it as a question about how information reaches decision-makers get something considerably more useful.
The real value is in the quality of the conversation: what energy is present, what could go wrong and what must be in place before work starts.
From attention to action
A campaign week creates attention, and attention is worth having. What keeps people safe is what happens after that attention has been created: someone pausing before a task, someone asking a question, someone spotting an energy source that could have been missed, and someone feeling backed when they stop work to do the right thing.