Serious incidents and fatalities remain a challenge despite industrywide progress on reducing overall injury rates. During keynotes, breakout sessions and professional development seminars, attendees of the 2025 NSC Safety Congress and Expo heard a lot about proposed ASTM standards focused on SIF prevention. Key elements were discussed and insights were shared about four proposed standards:
- Standard Guide for Recording Priority Occupational Injuries and Illnesses and SIF-related Serious Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities (revised ASTM E2920.24)
- Standard Guide for Recording Serious Incident and Fatality Events (other than employee work-related injury and illness; new)
- Standard Guide for Identification, Prioritization and Reduction of Risk of Occupationally Related Serious Incidents and Fatalities (new)
- Standard Guide for Engaging Workers and Leaders in Identification, Prioritization and Reduction of Risk of Occupationally Related Serious Incidents and Fatalities (new)
For decades, organizations have relied on declining injury rates as proof of progress. SIF events tell a different story. While minor incidents decrease, serious and fatal outcomes often remain flat or increase. Traditional metrics fail to illuminate the most critical risks, and compliance-heavy approaches rarely address the realities of “work as done.” Together, the proposed revisions to the E2920 standard and the three proposed global ASTM standards would set the stage for a smarter, more effective model of prevention that prioritizes what matters most.
Focus on critical risk reduction for SIF prevention
The recently proposed revisions to the ASTM standard would create a clear framework for identifying, prioritizing and reducing SIF risk. The proposed revisions would emphasize a three-part model:
- Identify hazards and work tasks with SIF potential through tools such as task inventories and the Energy Wheel (a hazard recognition tool used to identify energy source risks).
- Prioritize exposures by focusing on severity, likelihood and safeguard reliability – not only frequency of occurrence.
- Reduce risk through safeguards that are reliable, verifiable and measurable in operation.
The new elements highlight the limitations of treating training or signs as safeguards, with stronger weight given to elimination, isolation and engineered protections. The revision would integrate leading indicators and continuous feedback as essential to the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle of learning and improvement.
Complementing the revision of E2920 is the new, proposed ASTM guide dedicated specifically to risk prioritization and reduction strategies.
This guide bridges technical methodology with practical implementation. Key components include transparency in risk ranking so stakeholders understand how SIF risks are assessed and why some require urgent action; criteria for prioritization when safeguards are absent, ineffective or inconsistent with standards; and cross-functional collaboration, ensuring engineering, operations and safety teams engage holistically in risk reduction initiatives.
The guide offers organizations a practical reference to focus resources on the hazards most likely to cause life-altering harm, driving consistency across industries and geographies.
Engage employees and executives
The second new, proposed ASTM guide addresses what many safety pros already acknowledge: safeguards alone aren’t enough. Engagement across executives, supervisors, contractors and frontline workers is essential to ensure systems function.
This guide introduces immediately useful tools and principles:
- Learning teams to capture the realities of frontline work and address systemic risks
- Operational walkthroughs during which leaders verify safeguards and demonstrate visible commitment
- Role-based expectations clarifying what executives, supervisors and frontline teams should contribute to prevention
By framing engagement not as participation alone but as accountability and dialogue, this guide reinforces the trust and transparency needed to close the gap between “work as imagined” and “work as done.”
Lessons emerging from implementation
Organizations applying these frameworks have gained clear lessons:
Clarity through engagement. When engagement is treated as a competency – not a checked box – it reveals blind spots and improves solutions.
Proximity breeds truth. Firsthand exposure to operational realities clarifies if safeguards exist and function.
Alignment creates accountability. Roles are distinct but connected: executives allocate resources, supervisors lead with clarity and workers provide insight into real safeguard performance.
These lessons highlight how the proposed standards complement each other with the technical detail of ASTM E2920 and the Risk Prioritization Guide with the human focus of the engagement guide.
From pilots to broader impact
Full-scale implementation isn’t necessary to gain benefits. Early wins often begin with pilots:
- Reviewing near misses for latent SIF exposure.
- Shifting audits toward safeguard verification.
- Coaching leaders on asking better questions to frontline workers.
Success depends on how prevention is framed. Positioning SIF-focused programs as business priorities focused on protecting people, assets and reputation creates stronger buy-in than treating them as compliance measures.
Continuous learning anchors the system
Finally, all four proposed ASTM standards emphasize continuous improvement. Leading indicators, feedback loops, and systematic review of potential and actual SIF events inform ongoing adjustments. By embedding continual learning into routine operations, organizations avoid stagnation and adapt faster to the realities of changing work environments.
Moving from rules to resilience
The biggest lesson isn’t that organizations need more requirements. It’s that they need smarter frameworks, clearer priorities and stronger conversations. The revised ASTM E2920 standard would deliver a sharper technical model. The proposed risk prioritization guide would ensure resources flow to the most significant threats. And the engagement guide would embed trust, dialogue and accountability at every level. Together, they would mark a significant step forward for resilient, effective safety management and for returning every worker home safely.
