On Aug. 10, 2026, ASSP released its “Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) Prevention Convening Report,” highlighting key themes and insights to advance SIF prevention. To take a deeper look at those themes, we’re exploring the report in a three-part blog series. This is the second installment.

To be or not to be? If a safety standard is written in such a way that it leaves a safety professional feeling like Hamlet in a full-on existential crisis, it probably won’t land on a worksite either. That inability to interpret crucial safety information, processes and guidance can create huge barriers for the people who need it the most.

“Standards experts write very technical documents,” says Lauren Bauerschmidt, CSP, senior manager of standards and technical publications at the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP). “They are written in shalls and shoulds, and you feel like you’re reading Old English or Shakespeare. But then you get the people who are actually going to be working at height, for example. What do they need to know? What does their supervisor need to tell them to get ready? It’s not in that language.

“A lot of times, what we hear is, ‘Tell me what to do. I don’t have time. Just break it down for me.’ But what’s hard is that with a lot of these things, there’s not just one answer.”

The communication gap she describes was identified this past spring, when ASSP convened nearly 100 safety professionals and industry experts to try to answer why existing hazard controls haven’t prevented serious injuries or fatalities (SIFs) from falls from height and lockout/tagout (LOTO) failures. Participants from the two working sessions, held in Chicago and Washington, D.C., each pointed to creating simpler, plain-language guides, pictograms, checklists or videos of standards materials to make them more usable.

Bauerschmidt compares it to teenagers learning how to drive. Reading a manual isn’t necessarily going to help. “You actually have to go and start doing some of these things,” she says. “Watching videos or seeing it in real-life is where it’s going to happen.”

During the D.C. working session, the safety professionals homed in on a “Rules of Rules” governance test that could serve as a three-part check on whether the standards material is working. It would determine if the standard is:

1. Fully known
2. Makes sense
3. Consistently enforced

A process like this can help ensure a standard is usable, which Bauerschmidt describes as something someone who hasn't spent their entire career entrenched in that safety topic still understands.

“We have the standards,” she says. “Are they being implemented? Is there a challenge in implementing them? Fall protection is a great example. We’ve got more standards, but injury rates aren't getting better. There’s a gap because people are still getting hurt. So, what’s happening?”

Bauerschmidt says ASSP’s Standards-Based User Groups (SBUGs) are identifying gaps in standards implementation and will use those findings to develop tools and resources. This includes work by the Fall Protection and LOTO SBUGs — practitioner-led groups that provide structured feedback loops between the standards development team and people working in the field.