Workplace health and safety is by no means a novel concern. It’s been a clear legal responsibility for employers in England since at least the 1830s, and things have obviously changed a lot since those early days.

In 2026, not only are there a lot more regulations in place to protect employees, but there are also a whole host of new risks that threaten both employees and organisations. From background checks to ongoing risk analysis, here’s what a safe workplace looks like in 2026. 

Background checks

One of the pillars of creating a safe workplace is to use background checks properly. Using services like Personnel Checks to carry out DBS checks on candidates helps to ensure that you only bring honest, trustworthy people into your organisation, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to cover yourself in this way. 

In some settings, these checks will be an optional extra that you can choose to use or not. In others, such as in healthcare and education, they can be a strict legal responsibility. 

Digital security

Now that so many workplaces primarily exist in the online world, digital security has never been so important. Keeping the digital workplace safe involves a whole range of new protective measures, and often requires becoming literate in digital security itself. 

It’s critical that you work with specialist cybersecurity teams, and that you understand your duties under both GDPR and more niche-specific regulatory frameworks when it comes to data protection and storage. 

Cybersecurity breaches don’t just leave your business and brand reputation vulnerable, they can also leave you liable to huge fines and other serious legal repercussions.

Psychological wellbeing 

Increasingly, both regulators and industry experts across the board are recognising the importance of treating employee mental health seriously. Mental health is now considered equally important to physical wellbeing by the Health and Safety Executive, and it’s important that your workplace risk assessments take this into account. 

Whether by providing mental health days off or proactively managing stress and workload to prevent burnout, taking your employees’ psychological well-being seriously isn’t too hard, and can have hugely beneficial effects. 

Ongoing efforts

Given just how rapidly workplace safety-related issues are evolving nowadays, it’s imperative that businesses remain dynamic in their approach. 

This means adopting an ongoing approach to risk analysis, treating a range of threats as fluid, ever-changing issues that need to be tackled in a similar manner. 

The moment business owners and risk assessors lose this kind of dynamism, they leave themselves vulnerable to a whole host of new threats, and lose the capacity to deal with them proactively.

Maintaining a safe workplace in 2026 has become slightly more complicated. There are a lot of new risks to be aware of, but there are also a range of new technologies and services that make risk management significantly more efficient. By remaining adaptable and working with the right safety partners, it is absolutely possible to manage risks, both old and new, in an effective manner.