The Best Insights from 2025

As 2025 wraps up (where did the time go?!), we’re excited to look back at the incredible year it’s been. We’ve distilled the best insights and biggest trends into our favourite thought leadership moments of the year.

We hosted 11 fantastic webinars, featuring the industry’s best and brightest. A massive thank you to everyone who participated and shared their knowledge with us. 

Our key themes this year were clear: psychosocial and psychological safety, the future of AI in health and safety, and health and safety leadership.

Psychosocial and Psychological Safety

We started the year strong with Lisa White, Head of Protective Services at Bank of New Zealand. Her webinar, Retail Crime: The Health and Safety Crisis in Customer-Facing Environments, tackled the urgent issue of retail crime and its impact on employee psychosocial safety. Our favorite takeaway was Lisa’s behaviour matrix, which provides a solid, fair framework for enforcing a strict no-aggression policy by ranking customer behaviours with set consequences.

Another highlight in psychosocial safety was Dr. Natalie Flatt, Psychologist and Co-Founder at Connect Psych Services (who will be back in early 2026!). In Building a Psychologically Safe Workplace to Prevent Psychosocial Risks, Dr. Flatt demonstrated how psychological safety both protects employees — by building trust — and acts as a control for identifying and preventing workplace risks. 

The most profound moment was the reminder of the significant impact (both positive and negative) a leader’s self-regulation has on their team’s mental health and wellbeing during stressful times. You can learn more in Dr. Flatt’s guest blog on the ecoPortal media hub.

AI in Health and Safety

AI was another hot topic, and we dedicated many conversations to it in 2025. A standout was Liz Hancock, Health, Safety and Environment Director at DCC Technology. Her webinar, AI-Powered Risk Intelligence: Smarter Insights, Safer Workplaces, explored AI-driven risk assessment, data analytics, and its role as a co-pilot for safety professionals globally. We loved Liz’s insight into AI's power to surface subtle patterns in large datasets that often escape human notice, underscoring how technology drives more proactive, data-driven safety decisions.

Equally compelling was our CEO, Dr. Manuel Seidel’s blog, AI in Health and Safety: Beyond the Buzz to Real Impact. He explains that AI’s true strength lies not just in technology, but in breaking down traditional barriers to engagement and decision-making, offering real impact when applied directly to long-standing safety challenges. This is a must-read for anyone interested in AI in H&S.

Health and Safety Leadership

We couldn’t recap the year without celebrating the incredible leadership insights we’ve encountered. A recent, powerful highlight was Yolanda Oosthuizen of Horizon Energy Group Limited’s presentation at the OHS Leaders Summit New Zealand. Yolanda reminded us that while we invest in large systems, workplace culture is ultimately shaped by "micro-moments"—the small, everyday leadership choices.

Trust is built, or broken, in these moments: Choosing to ask, "What made sense to you at the time?" rather than, "What went wrong?" Consistently reinforcing positive behaviours, not just reacting to failures. Taking the discipline to genuinely pause and listen, especially under pressure.

We closed out the year with The Trust Dividend: Why Care, Character and Competence Shape Safety Cultures, a fantastic presentation by Clive Lloyd, Psychologist and Principal Consultant at GYST. Clive dove deep into how leaders can intentionally build a foundation of trust through three core drivers: Care, Character, and Competence.

Our favourite takeaway from this webinar was Clive’s discussion on the potential dangers of "zero harm" policies. He explained that these policies can inadvertently cultivate a culture of mistrust, leading workers (especially contractors) to hide or fail to report risks and incidents due to fear of reprisal.

Final Words

We had so many incredible "aha" moments this year that we were seriously limited by this short format (you’d be reading for days otherwise!). A huge thank you to everyone who contributed their insights in 2025, especially to all our webinar speakers. We highly recommend you check out our collection of webinars to enjoy the amazing insights our speakers brought this year.

This short and snappy read is part of our Safety Snack© series, made for busy safety pros who like their insights one bite at a time.