New maturity-based metrics offer Canadian safety leaders a sharper lens on contractor risk
Canadian organisations are depending on contractors, subcontractors, and temporary workers more than ever, and the safety data used to evaluate them is struggling to keep pace.
Traditional safety metrics are failing the modern workforce
That was the central message of a May 2026 on-demand webinar hosted by supply chain risk management platform Avetta, titled Beyond Compliance: A New Lens on Contractor Safety Performance. The session was presented by Scott DeBow, CSP, ARM, Director of Health, Safety and Environmental at Avetta, and Wyatt Bradbury, Principal for Health and Safety at Avetta.
DeBow opened by framing the core problem: despite decades of measuring safety through total recordable incident rates (TRIR), preventable fatalities in the United States have been rising since 2002, even as recordable incidents declined. He noted that similar trends are visible globally. According to National Safety Council survey data cited in the webinar, more than 60 per cent of workplace fatalities over an 11-year period occurred at small employers.
"The data we've been depending on isn't telling us what we need to know," DeBow said. "We need more than just compliance and traditional safety metrics."
Bradbury reinforced the point, noting that 71 per cent of webinar survey respondents use TRIR to measure safety performance, a metric he argued does not reliably predict future incidents. He referenced his own research published in the Professional Safety Journal (2025), which examined the statistical and predictive limitations of TRIR, DART, and EMR.
Moving from compliance to maturity
The webinar introduced two tools Avetta has developed to address the gap: the Safety Maturity Index (SMI) and the Culture Maturity Index (CMI). The SMI draws on 10 recognised safety and health management standards, including ISO 45001, ANSI Z10, and industry-specific frameworks for oil and gas, nuclear, and aviation, to assess how mature an organisation's safety systems are, not merely whether programs exist on paper. The CMI, developed in partnership with the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP), measures management commitment, employee empowerment, and trust.
An analysis of more than 13,000 contractors on the Avetta platform found that only 26 per cent were both compliant and mature. Bradbury called this group "cash money contractors," the ones equipped to handle the work and the risk.
"Instead of just saying you're not compliant, we now get to take another layer of evaluation," Bradbury explained. "These are organisations that are mature and can handle from a risk standpoint what they're faced with."
Watch the on-demand webinar
The full session is available now. Canadian safety professionals looking to move beyond compliance checklists and build a more risk-informed contractor management programme can access the recording here.
