Workplace safety is quietly becoming a retention and attendance problem, not just a compliance line item. A new survey from workplace platform Envoy, fielded in July 2026 among 1,000 employed U.S. adults working at physical locations, found that 74% have avoided going to work at some point because of a perceived threat, whether severe weather, a security concern, a transportation disruption, or civil unrest near their workplace.
The numbers behind that headline figure point to a wider gap than employers may realize. More than half of respondents, 56%, said they have felt unsafe at work, and 53% said they have had a commute that felt unsafe. Severe weather was the single biggest driver of avoidance at 54%, followed by travel or safety advisories at 20% and transportation disruptions at 19%. Generationally, the gap is stark: 82% of Gen Z workers said they have avoided work over a safety concern, compared with 62% of Baby Boomers.
The original insight buried in Envoy’s data is a communication failure, not just a safety one. Workers said they learn about threats near their workplace primarily from news and social media, at 54%, while direct employer communication ranked a distant fourth, at just 40%. That means most employees are finding out about the risk to their own workday from the same feed as everyone else, not from the organization that employs them and, in many cases, already has the information.
For HR and workforce technology leaders, that gap is the actionable part of this data. Real-time notification systems, already common in the broader wave of AI-driven workforce tools HR teams are adopting, are a natural fit for closing it, but only if safety communication is treated as core HR infrastructure rather than an afterthought bolted on after the workforce disruptions already reshaping headcount planning this year. Employers who move first on direct, verified threat communication stand to capture both the safety benefit and the loyalty dividend of being the trusted source, not the last to know.
Source: Envoy
