At RISKWORLD 2026 in Philadelphia, Dan Reynolds, editor in chief of Risk & Insurance, caught up with Jeff Cole, Assistant Vice President of National Accounts for Sentry^® Insurance. Apart from the occasion of the conference, the conversation was spurred by the release of Sentry’s 2026 C-Suite Stress Index: Large Businesses report.

Some key findings of the report include…

• 85% of large business leaders plan to increase their investment in worker safety in 2026.
• 76% of large business leaders view higher litigation activity and nuclear verdicts as a problem in their industry.
• 18%, or fewer than one in five large business leaders, feel their insurance coverage is adequate

What follows is a transcript of the conversation in Philadelphia, edited for length and clarity.

Jeff Cole, Assistant Vice President of National Accounts, Sentry® Insurance

Risk & Insurance: Thanks for meeting with us Jeff. What are the most striking findings from the C-suite survey that readers should take away?

Jeff Cole: One of the most significant findings from the report is that a large majority of CFOs and buyers report feeling as stressed as they were last year, if not more so. Yet, just under three-quarters of them remain optimistic, believing they will make it through.

It’s a very interesting combination. People are accustomed to working in stressful situations, and these are very successful individuals.

They recognize the stress, they work their way through it, and they remain optimistic about the outcome.

R&I: That statistic from the C-Suite report on safety investment is certainly eye-catching. How do you help customers prioritize their safety investments and goals?

JC: Safety is like anything else. There are numerous activities you can undertake, so prioritization is essential. To help customers prioritize, it all comes back to open communication.

We need to understand what’s important to them and where they want to be, and then help guide them down that path, rather than trying to help with everything. Because if you try to fix everything, sometimes you end up fixing nothing.

Ultimately, that prioritization comes from a clear understanding of the customer.

R&I: What investment trends can we expect to see from companies over the next five years, particularly regarding safety and risk management tools?

JC: When it comes to auto challenges, telematics are absolutely critical. However, many people stop at the camera when they think about telematics. Cameras themselves vary significantly—you can have outward-facing or inward-facing cameras, and some even trigger prompts to drivers who appear to be falling asleep or distracted.

But it’s not just about spending money on the camera; it’s about investing in the program that uses the data coming from that camera. We’ve seen many companies take that first step of installing cameras, but they fail to optimize by taking the second step, which is having someone actively monitor the results.

You need actionable outcomes based on what you observe. If someone is exhibiting bad behavior, they need to be confronted, corrected, and given the opportunity to improve. If they can’t be corrected, sometimes you need to take pretty stiff actions. It’s really about the continuity—the entirety of the safety program built around the telematics.

On the workers’ compensation side, the current state of the workforce has fundamentally shifted the role of safety. Safety has always been about protecting your current workers, but going forward, I truly believe it’s more than that. Being a safe workplace will become increasingly appealing to the limited pool of available workers.

Safety will become a recruiting tool, not just a retention tool. For example, if you’re a big employer in a hazardous industry and people see an ambulance at your facility once a month, they might think twice about working there. But if they see a billboard touting five thousand days without a lost-time injury, they recognize that you care about your associates and employees—and that’s the type of place they want to work.

Retention is equally important because training people is difficult. It doesn’t matter if workers are available or not if you fail to train them properly once you have them. Without proper training, you’re just inviting injury in the front door.

Ultimately, all of this comes down to identifying priorities. You have to figure out the growth areas for the company, understand their vision, and align with what they want to accomplish. If a company plans to fully automate a process next year, it doesn’t make sense to send a full ergonomics team to evaluate that process over the next twelve months.

However, if there’s a key process that isn’t going to be automated, then an ergonomic assessment makes sense, particularly for repetitive motion concerns.

R&I: What experience first shaped your perspective on workplace safety?

JC: The summer before my first year in college, I worked at a chemical factory. They had a billboard right outside the company, at the front door, that displayed something like, “1,500 days without a lost-time injury.”

I was brought in as a summer intern, a naive high school kid, and put on the maintenance crew. Basically, when something broke, I was the gopher who went with the maintenance tech to fix it.

I remember one situation in particular. Something was broken, and we had to take a big nut off to loosen it, fix it, and tighten it back up. It was on a raised stairwell with a landing, and the pole was just a little too high, so you had to step up onto something to loosen it.

The maintenance guy was going to do it, but he had a bad back. I hopped up, loosened the bolt, we fixed it, and tightened it back up. The next morning, I got called into the plant manager’s office, and he said, “Hey, someone witnessed you doing what appeared to be an unsafe act.”

He was actually a friend of the family, so I knew him very well. He told me, “You can’t do that.” I responded, “Well, I was just helping out. We had to step up.”

He explained, “It looked like you were hanging over the edge of the railing from our angle. We can’t even have the appearance of an act like that occurring.” He added that if I ever felt put in a position where someone was asking me to do something like that, I should politely decline and say it’s not a safe act.

It was then that I reflected on what that billboard was all about.

R&I: After 40 years in this industry, what has kept you engaged and committed to this line of work?

JC: I enjoy solving business problems, particularly those involving math. The math has never bothered me, and this industry, especially now, offers incredible opportunities with data and the ability to analyze it. Whether it’s on the pricing side or the claims side, such as using our injured employee factor to identify which cases are most likely to worsen, there’s always something to dig into.

It’s a great environment that has evolved over time rather than remaining static. Every day brings a new challenge.

Quite frankly, we do what we do so everyone else in the world can focus on what they do best, which is their own business. They can operate with the assurance that if something bad happens, it won’t put them out of business.

That allows them to truly focus on being the best widget manufacturer, the best service provider, or whatever their specialty is. There are people who excel at many things in life but aren’t good at insurance. If they had to focus their time and effort on understanding every nuance of insurance to avoid missteps, they would never get anything done, and we wouldn’t be where we are as a society.

If you’re good at something, it helps make the world work better.

To learn more, please visit: https://www.sentry.com/.

This article was produced by the R&I Brand Studio, a unit of the advertising department of Risk & Insurance, in collaboration with Sentry. The editorial staff of Risk & Insurance had no role in its preparation.