NSC 2026: What Safety Leaders Told Me at the Booth
In short
Safety leaders at NSC in May 2026 wanted help delivered to each person, not a verdict on them. Okaya's CEO Greg Menvielle spent much of the show at the booth, where people kept the focus on readiness and avoided the word wellness. The conversations kept coming back to staffing, crude after-action forms, wearables people forget, the organization's own resources, and a wish for prediction.
In May 2026 we had a booth at NSC, and I spent much of the show there talking with safety leaders.
What did I take away?
The people I talked with wanted help delivered to each person, not a verdict on them. One visitor at the booth put it this way:
"I love it. My big thing is don't tell me that I can't do the job. Tell me the best way for me to accomplish my task as safely and effectively as possible given the state that I'm in. That is the true changemaker."
We were talking about keeping the data private and giving people agency over their actions and over the remedies.
To be transparent, nearly everyone who stopped by was a safety officer, so what follows skews to the leadership side. Take it with a grain of salt.
Why does the word readiness matter?
The safety leaders I talked with stay away from "wellness". They keep the focus on readiness.
Why is staffing a survival question?
Workforce shortages came up again and again, and they're getting deeper across industries, including power and transportation. Operators need to keep their people healthy and engaged. For them it's a question of business survival.
Unions came up too. Many are still concerned about surveillance, but they're starting to see the need to work together against a common enemy, fatigue.
What's wrong with after-action forms?
Everyone liked the idea of marking an event and using it to start a conversation, especially if it feels like a real conversation. As one person told me, the current forms and approaches are really crude. Picture a form that asks Bob how it felt to see his friend get hurt because his team didn't secure the machine. People are always defensive when they're asked to fill out an after-action report.
Why do wearables struggle on the job?
One question I heard: "Can you integrate with wearables to help me make sense of my data, or use it as part of the conversation and analysis?" At the same time, people forget their wearables. They don't forget their phones. We don't require a wearable.
Adoption is hard for other reasons too. People think their bosses are monitoring them all the time when they're working. And in many jobs a wearable can become a hazard if it gets caught in something and leads to an injury, so many companies don't want to fight the unions to get a wrist band authorized.
What does agency look like?
Agency came up too. People want the help delivered to the individual. The goal is employees making the attempt to improve themselves, not a system whose answer is "Bob is not safe."
Does training hold up under pressure?
A few people told me they have a hard time getting people to remember what they were trained on at the moment a crisis or emergency happens.
Which resources do people want?
The interest was only in the organization's own resources. Nobody wanted outside content or the ability to add libraries. The reasons were security and liability.
Do safety leaders want prediction?
The biggest question at the booth was how we fit into larger systems. Digging deeper, it came down to prediction. When is my team going to be at risk? They want the full cycle, with other data sources brought in. They also want it predictive down to the individual, so people can ask for help before they need it.
Real-time resource allocation came up from a few people after I explained how resources could be shown to people based on their needs. Their view: "If I am going to spend $100k for my team I'd rather spend it on something they are going to use, but I can't know a year in advance what they are going to need."
I told them I don't think we're at the stage of being able to be that predictive, but it's an interesting trend.
Where does readiness fit?
What I heard at NSC: help delivered to each person, not a verdict on them, using their own organization's resources, without another device to remember. That's the readiness gap we work on at Okaya.
Key points
- Greg Menvielle's takeaway from NSC in May 2026: safety leaders wanted help delivered to each person, not a verdict on them.
- People kept the focus on readiness, avoided the word wellness, and staffing shortages were a business-survival question across power, transportation and other industries.
- Visitors raised crude after-action forms, wearables people forget or can't wear safely, training recall under pressure, the organization's own resources, and a wish for prediction.