scope:

This standard defines requirements and expectations for organizations to establish effective measurement systems that assess safety and health performance, reduce risks, identify gaps in safety and health management systems, and drive needed improvements. It applies to all organizations and provides flexibility based on their size, type of management system and level of organizational risk. The standard can supplement requirements from government agencies, non-government organizations and other groups such as rating agencies that may have their own private or public reporting requirements.

This standard broadens the scope of metrics beyond incident rates and other failure metrics. It promotes the use of leading metrics, metrics related to success, and business impact. Business impacts include effects on productivity, quality, worker well-being, recruitment, retention, morale and engagement, absenteeism, company reputation, financial health, and shareholder value.

Purpose

This standard helps organizations establish or improve safety and health program measurement, with special emphasis on risk management as a key means to reduce the likelihood of incidents. The standard also provides the means to track and demonstrate the impact that safety and health efforts have on the organization's business. It utilizes a balanced approach to understand and assess safety and health efforts using leading, lagging, and impact metrics. Establishing an effective measurement system supports organizational safety and health governance, accountability, management, operational effectiveness, and continual improvement. This new view of safety acknowledges that only measuring incident rates is not an effective measure of safety and health stability, performance, and resilience.

The approach in this standard helps achieve goals, with checks and balances utilizing leading, lagging, and impact metrics. Without this balance, continual improvement can be challenging. Metrics must be meaningful, informative, and drive change.

The Z16.1 standard outlines a process that encourages integration with organizational management systems using a model to facilitate continual improvement (see Figure 1).

The continual improvement model shown in Figure 1 is flexible and is used for developing initial metrics or refining existing metrics. Existing metrics are to be validated using the process in Figure 1. The balanced set of metrics is then systematically monitored, evaluated, and updated to drive continual improvement in safety and health performance.