Safety starts with speaking up

During a maintenance training session in San Antonio in 2025, Boeing instructor Albizu Vega-Guzman observed a potential issue involving how technicians were using certain tools. He was concerned about potential quality and product safety impacts but unsure who to contact.

So what did he do? He filed a Speak Up report.

Speak Up is Boeing’s reporting channel for potential product safety, quality and compliance hazards, and a core element of Boeing’s Safety Management System (SMS). The platform helps surface hazards early, assess risk and ensure corrective actions are tracked and shared across the enterprise.

While the system allows for confidential or anonymous reporting, in this instance, Vega-Guzman gave permission to talk about his report.

Speak Up investigators and quality leaders looked into the San Antonio report and issued a site-wide communication and quality alert to ensure technicians had the correct tool guidance. That timely action demonstrates how early reporting enables rapid containment, correction and enterprise learning.

Speak Up reporting has increased, with Boeing employees filing nearly four times as many reports in 2025 than in 2023, indicating that more employees are using the system to identify and report potential product safety, quality and compliance hazards. Most reports relate to production methods and processes, buy-off and stamping, flight operations, and engineering design and analysis. Each report creates an opportunity to address the risk immediately, find root causes, and prevent recurrence.

“We can’t fix what we don’t know,” said Lacey Pittman, vice president of Global Aerospace Safety. “Creating an environment where employees feel encouraged to report potential product safety, quality and compliance hazards is a key part of the positive safety culture we foster.”

Lacey Pittman, vice president of Global Aerospace Safety and SMS at Boeing, said the rise of reporting reflects the company’s efforts to build positive safety culture through alignment under our SMS, better training, and better communication.

“We can’t fix what we don’t know,” she said. “Creating an environment where employees feel encouraged to report potential product safety, quality and compliance hazards is a key part of the positive safety culture we foster.”

Here’s how Boeing is strengthening safety culture and SMS:

Training:

• Since 2020, annual SMS and Speak Up courses have been mandatory for employees. These courses emphasize every employee’s responsibility to know their own work, identify hazards and then report those hazards.

Awareness: 

• Companywide campaigns with SMS and Speak Up banners, posters and other materials clarify how to report and the role each employee plays in product safety.

Promotion:

• The Safety Experience at Boeing is an online resource which brings together industry data, storytelling and real-world examples of how aerospace safety has improved over decades, as well as the role each employee plays in that journey.

Manager engagement:

• Leaders are expected to encourage reporting, protect confidentiality, focus on learning instead of blame and keep teams informed of actions taken.

Pittman said the increase in employee reporting is a positive sign – particularly when it comes to employee trust. That trust is built one conversation, one report and one improvement at a time.

“It shows that people are engaging with the system,” Pittman said. “It gives us the opportunity to respond and make the system safer.”

By Ivan Gale and Mychaela Kekeris