The Frontline Engagement Gap: What KPA Customers Do Differently

You know that feeling when you ask your team to report a near-miss and they actually do it? Not three days later, after you’ve reminded them twice…but right there in the moment? That’s not luck. That’s engagement.

And according to our new benchmark study, it’s also something KPA customers achieve far more consistently than organizations using other safety management solutions.

We surveyed safety managers across high-hazard industries about frontline engagement in their organizations. We asked identical questions to KPA customers and organizations using competitive solutions. The goal was simple: understand whether your safety platform actually makes a difference in how workers participate in safety programs.

The results were clear. KPA customers break through to excellence at dramatically higher rates than organizations using other approaches.

The Bottom Line Up Front

Here’s what the data shows:

• KPA customers are 94% more likely to achieve excellent frontline engagement compared to organizations using other safety management solutions.
• And they’re 72% less likely to face serious engagement problems.

Let’s put numbers to that.

• Among KPA customers, 41% achieve excellent engagement scores (40+ out of 50 points). Only 21% of non-customers reach that level.
• On the other end, just 9% of KPA customers have critical engagement gaps, compared to 45% of organizations using competitive solutions.

That’s not a small difference. That’s the difference between a safety program that occasionally breaks through to excellence and one that consistently stays stuck at acceptable.

Over this three-part series, we’re going to dig into what separates excellent engagement from mediocre engagement. We’ll show you the specific metrics that matter, the technologies that enable participation, and the cultural factors that make the difference between a safety program that works and one that just exists.

But first, let’s talk about what we actually measured.

The Engagement Score Breakdown

Frontline engagement isn’t one thing. It’s a combination of factors that work together to create a culture where safety actually happens, not just gets documented.

We measured ten dimensions of frontline safety engagement, including leadership commitment, communication effectiveness, resource accessibility, worker participation, and feedback responsiveness. Each one matters. Each one affects the others.

When we combined all ten dimensions into a single overall engagement score, KPA customers averaged 38.8 out of 50. Organizations using other solutions averaged 32.8. That six-point gap represents nearly a full tier difference in safety culture maturity.

But the real story is in the distribution. While both groups face engagement challenges, KPA customers cluster toward the top of the scale while non-customers cluster in the middle. More than four out of ten KPA customers achieve excellence. Fewer than two out of ten non-customers get there.

Meanwhile, nearly half of non-customers struggle with serious engagement gaps. Only 9% of KPA customers face that same challenge.

What’s Driving These Results?

Here’s where it gets interesting. The performance differences don’t happen by accident. They happen because of specific capabilities that either enable participation or create friction.

Think about resource accessibility. At KPA customer organizations, workers can pull up a safety procedure or an SDS right from their phone while they’re in the field. They don’t have to interrupt their workflow. They don’t have to walk back to the office. They don’t have to remember to do it later. They just do it.

At organizations using other solutions, workers face barriers at every turn. The information exists somewhere, but getting to it requires stopping what you’re doing, finding the right person, and hoping they’re available. So workers skip it. Not because they don’t care, but because the friction is too high.

That single factor—resource accessibility—shows the largest performance gap we measured. KPA customers score 19.3% better than non-customers. They’re 91% more likely to achieve excellence in accessibility and 83% less likely to have serious problems getting workers the information they need.

And resource accessibility is just one of five critical engagement drivers we’ll explore in this series.

Why This Matters Now

If your safety program feels stuck at “good enough,” you’re not alone. Our data shows that most organizations—even many KPA customers—cluster around acceptable performance. They meet their compliance requirements. They run their training programs. They investigate incidents when they happen.

But here’s what the benchmark study reveals: breaking through from acceptable to excellent is possible, and it happens at dramatically different rates depending on your approach.

The workers on your team know when safety is a priority and when it’s just paperwork. They can tell whether your safety program exists to protect them or to protect the company from fines. And their level of engagement reflects that understanding.

The question isn’t whether engagement is hard—it is. The question is whether your current approach makes it harder than it needs to be.

What’s Coming Next

In the next post, we’ll break down the five critical dimensions where KPA customers pull ahead of organizations using other solutions. You’ll see exactly which metrics matter most and why those specific factors create such dramatic differences in engagement outcomes.