Review of successful Occupational Safety and Health benchmarking initiatives

Within the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) benchmarking has been defined as ‘a planned process by which an organisation compares its health and safety processes and performance with others to learn how to reduce accidents and ill health, improve compliance with health and safety law and/or cut compliance costs’.

Using this definition, the overarching aim of this project was to review occupational safety and health (OSH) benchmarking schemes that have been set up at sector, Member State or European level. The research also set out to assess the benefits that such schemes can deliver, as well as their limitations, and to identify the key factors and main obstacles to their success.