The Situation Room

‘Tis (Always) the Season for Dynamic Human Risk: Why Static Safety Falls Short

Tis The Season For Dynamic Human Risk Image

We all feel a little extra stress around the holidays. It’s not just anecdotal — research from the American Psychological Association shows 89% of U.S. adults say they feel stressed during the holidays, and that mental stress translates into physical risk: EcoOnline data shows nearly half (44%) of organisations globally report a clear uptick in health and safety incidents during the holiday period. Many organisations rightly respond by scaling up or adding to safety protocols and programs.

EcoOnline data shows nearly half (44%) of organisations globally report a clear uptick in health and safety incidents during the holiday period.

But the holidays aren’t the only time when safety risks jump up. The reality is that human-centred health and safety risks are rarely static, because the most dynamic risk factors of all are the humans themselves. Human-factor risks, from mental health to physical health, shift with seasons, deadlines, workforce composition, operating pressure and geography, amongst many subtle and nuanced variables.

Yet, most safety management systems feature static mitigation: fixed controls, uniform training, one-size procedures and safety expectations that assume work, workers and conditions are stable. And when your risk approach stays static while the real world moves, you end up always a little under-protected in some areas — and a little over-protected in others.

Challenge your thinking:

Are you accounting for all the risks that change with the season — or only the ones on the weather app? Join the live debate on 15 January as experts debate why safety still relies on fixed controls — even as risk shifts with seasons, deadlines, workforce mix, operating pressure, and geography.

Most safety risks aren’t static at all

Organisations routinely model volatility. They forecast demand swings, supply chain disruptions, staffing gaps, macroeconomic pressure, weather variability, geopolitical shifts — and they build dynamic operational plans to match.

But when it comes to health, safety and environmental risks, that dynamic thinking is typically limited to weather: Winter brings ice. Summer brings heat. Autumn brings storms. Slips and trips rise when weather turns bad.

But other seasonal patterns shape risk just as much — and nearly all of them tie back to people:

Retail and logistics: Q4 deadlines increase fatigue, shortcuts and manual handling injuries. Research shows injury rates may rise by up to 15% in warehousing and retail during peak shopping periods.
Healthcare: “Sick season” spikes increase patient numbers and pressure on staff.
Financial services: Year-end and tax deadlines drive long hours and cognitive overload.
Manufacturing and warehousing: Holiday staffing gaps shift workloads to fewer people or more temp workers.
Construction: Construction injuries show strong seasonality. Weather windows push compressed schedules and corner-cutting, while busy seasons can amplify mental health risks.

Global operations complicate this further. While northern Europe faces freezing temperatures and long dark shifts, teams in India are contending with late-season monsoon rain. At the same time, operations in Western Australia are already hitting 35 degrees Celsius — and Japan is bracing for its first major winter front — all at the same time.

Challenge your thinking:

If you mapped incidents, near misses and absences across the year, would your controls line up with the peaks — or the averages?

The people layer: Human risk is the most dynamic of all

The most overlooked variable in health and safety is people. Risk shifts as your workforce and work ‘climate’ changes. :Fatigue increases as deadlines loom. Stress spikes during financial year-end, holiday peaks, or during staffing shortages. Mental health fluctuates in darker months and during longer periods away from home. Supervisors face increased pressure management patchwork teams and unexpected absences.

In short, the human side of safety is never static, yet many controls still treat it like it is. For example, EcoOnline data shows as much as half (45%) of organisations cite fatigue as a top seasonal risk, yet only 31% increase mental-health support during this period.

Challenge your thinking:

Is your “safety culture” equally strong for lone workers, temps and contractors — or only for your permanent staff? Register for the live debate on 15 January.

The forgotten few of seasonal risk: Contractors and temp workers

Contractors and temporary or seasonal workers have come an almost inevitable element of every organisation’s workforce. They’re also the group most consistently left out of safety planning — despite often being the most exposed when risk becomes dynamic: Research shows temporary workers face a 3x greater risk of traumatic occupational injuries compared to permanent workers. These workers typically join during peak demand, when pressure, expectations, and incident rates are already elevated.

Yet, they come in with:

Less familiarity with tasks, equipment, and site layouts
Compressed and/or inconsistent training
Different PPE standards or assumptions
Weaker integration into the organisation’s safety culture

EcoOnline data backs this up, showing the biggest risks for seasonal workers:

1. Seasonal illness (45%)
2. Fatigue from workload or long hours (42%)
3. Weather-related hazards (39%)
4. Stress/pressure to meet deadlines (37%)

Challenge your thinking:

Are contractors and seasonal workers integrated into your safety programme — or just adjacent to it?

Lone workers deserve their own risk lens

If any group exposes the flaw in static safety thinking, it’s lone workers. According to OSHA research, 64% of lone workers face a higher risk of accidents. But lone-worker risks are also more variable, because the factors that broadly impact worker risks hit lone workers harder: trying to meet compressed timelines or high-pressure demands, covering for absent colleagues, dealing with weather events or other disruptions, and coordinating with contractors or temps.

Yet many lone workers are treated the same as all other workers. And while some organisations do have lone-worker protocols, they’re static — fixed check-in intervals and static procedures that don’t account for how variable pressures present magnified impacts on lone workers.

Challenge your thinking:

Do you have lone-worker protocols — and are they a year-round constant, or as risk that fluctuates with workload, environment and team structure? Register now for the live debate on 15 January.

What does “dynamic safety” look like?

“Dynamic risk” sounds a little like a buzzword, but it’s really about doing a few practical things differently — using the data and knowledge you may already have. Critically, the goal isn’t to perfectly forecast every risk, but identify patterns of dynamic risk instead — and then build systems that can adapt as those patterns shift.

Organisations that are starting to get this right tend to:

Plan for the seasonality of risk like they do for seasonal demand: They review historic incident, near-miss, absence and overtime data by month and by site to identify patterns — then build specific seasonal safety campaigns and controls around those peaks.
Tailor controls by geography and activity: They accept that not every site faces the same conditions, and adjust controls, training and communications accordingly — rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all rulebook.
Put people data on the table: They look at who is doing the work — temps, contractors, lone workers, night-shift staff — and adapt induction, supervision and communication for those groups.
Create a culture of proactive safety awareness, not just post-incident reporting. Risk variability isn’t fully predictable — unexpected risks that emerge in real time won’t show up in the data until it’s too late. Leading organisations build a culture of proactive safety awareness, empowering their people to recognize and escalate these emerging risks. They make it easy (and safe) to say, “This route is more dangerous in the dark,” “We’re two people short on this shift,” or “Our contractors aren’t using the same PPE” — and they take clear action on that kind of input.

Closing the “data gap”

Many organisations don’t see dynamic risk clearly because the data that reflects it is scattered or incomplete. Incident and near-miss data isn’t always captured consistently. Contractor and seasonal worker incidents may sit in separate spreadsheets or third-party systems. Absence, overtime and mental health data often never connect back to safety.

Without viewing risk from this lens, it’s easy to assume risk is broadly stable — and to treat isolated spikes as anomalies rather than patterns.

Challenge your thinking:

If you had to explain your “risk seasonality profile” to the board tomorrow, could you — with evidence?

Can dynamic safety go too far?

There’s a tempting idea behind dynamic safety: if you can understand how risk fluctuates, you can “right-size” mitigation — improving protection when it’s most needed and avoiding unnecessary cost when it isn’t.

But how far do you push optimisation before you undermine the very purpose of risk controls — to catch what you can’t always see coming?

That balancing act between optimised adaptability and reliable protection is the central tension leaders must navigate as 2026 planning begins.

Challenge your thinking:

Is it safer to be dynamically right-sized — or consistently over-protected?

Join the live debate — Static controls, dynamic humans: Why safety needs a new approach to seasonal risk

Leaders will debate why safety still relies on fixed controls and one-size procedures — even as risk shifts with seasons, deadlines, workforce mix, operating pressure, and geography.

They’ll dig into what dynamic safety looks like in practice, where static assumptions break down, and how far organisations need to adapt as they plan for 2026.

Thursday, January 15 at 10:00 AM EST | 3:00 PM GMT | 30 minutes