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completed 12/2025
The DGUV’s Risk Observatory aims to identify, swiftly, changes that will impact upon the world of work, institutes of higher education, schools and children’s daycare centres in the future. What trends are set to change the world of work and education for insured persons over the next five to ten years, and where, how and to what extent? What do these changes mean for the prevention of occupational accidents, occupational diseases and work-related health hazards? Where are particular prevention efforts needed, and what form could they take?
In 2011, the German Social Accident Insurance Institutions tasked the IFA with developing and setting up a risk observatory. Since then, the Risk Observatory has supported proactive prevention activity by these institutions, by identifying top trends across and within sectors. Top trends are trends that will have a major impact on the safety and health of insured persons in the near future. Since 2011, the Risk Observatory has completed two survey cycles (2012-2016: project number IFA0096; 2017-2021: project number IFA0100). In the process, it has continuously refined its methodology.
A three-year cycle was planned for the third survey round. The survey round envisages a close integration with the DGUV trend search, and required certain considerations and work, which were conducted in a preparatory project (project number: IFA0102). Preparation included in the first instance a comprehensive collection of trends, serving as a starting-point for the survey in the Risk Observatory. This collection was published on the Risk Observatory’s web pages, where it will be continuously updated and supplemented. It comprises ten trend categories, each with up to 25 individual trends. The preparations also included the design and development of two independent surveys on which the Risk Observatory bases its identification of top trends: the sectoral relevance survey and the future relevance survey.
With this project, these instruments are now being put to use, and the operational phase of the third survey round began. Based on assessments by experts from the research community and occupational safety and health, this phase identified the developments with the greatest impact on the world of work and workplace safety and health.
The subject of the present project was the implementation of the new concept developed beforehand. This included conducting the surveys and, based on evaluation of the results, identifying and describing top trends, both sector-specific and across sectors. In the sectoral relevance survey, experts from the German Social Accident Insurance assessed all trends in the survey round in terms of their impact on the safety and health of insured persons in the experts’ respective sectors. The assessments by the experts in a sector were averaged for each trend. This approach enabled top trends specific to each sector to be identified.
In the future relevance survey, experts from the research community and occupational safety and health, both within and external to the German Social Accident Insurance, assessed trends solely from the perspective of their expertise with regard to these trends’ influence upon the world of work in the coming five to ten years. The experts’ assessments were averaged for each trend. Experts from the field of occupational safety and health also assessed the impact on the safety and health of insured persons. The results of the statistical evaluations of the future relevance survey revealed cross-sector top trends for each trend category.
In a subsequent step, trend descriptions were prepared for all top trends identified in the future relevance survey. These also identified the sectors affected by the trends and described the consequences relevant to preventive activity. In addition, trend descriptions were prepared for trends whose impact over the next five to ten years was assessed solely in the sectoral relevance survey as being highly significant. To refine the trend descriptions, in-depth interviews were conducted with experts from the survey group, in addition to literature and web searches concerning the trends.
The future relevance survey is to be conducted every three years. Between these surveys, the collection of trends is to be expanded, and newly identified trends must be evaluated to enable them to be included among the top trends where their influence is sufficiently great, and addressed in a trend description. For this reason, the Subcommittee New forms of work of the DGUV’s Expert committee Organisation (FB ORG) and its trend search group evaluate these newly identified trends at regular intervals in a rapid assessment procedure based on the same questions as the future relevance survey. The scale of a trend’s influence upon the occupational environment and on safety and health at work is estimated. With regard to the impact on safety and health at work, the anticipated risk presented by the trend and its impact are assessed, as is the need for new prevention measures or adaptation of existing measures.
The conference of prevention managers of the German Social Accident Insurance Institutions may decide to have particular top trends examined more closely, for example in expert committees and sub-committees of the DGUV, or in dialogue between accident insurance institutions, for example in a workshop or expert discussion.
In order to clarify terminology, terminological adjustments were made during implementation of the new concept for the Risk Observatory. Developments became "trends", global trends became "trend categories" and brief descriptions became "trend descriptions".
The Risk Observatory’s analysis of trends highlights key issues for occupational safety and health.
The purpose of the collection of trends was to answer the first question. At the time of launch of the surveys referred to above for prioritizing the collected trends, in the spring of 2023, the collection of trends comprised 117 trends, which were assigned to ten trend categories:
Ten different future relevance surveys – corresponding in number to the trend categories – were conducted, which were to assess the influence of the trends of each individual category on the world of work. 1,332 selected experts from the research community, together with prevention experts from the German Social Accident Insurance, were asked for their opinions. The response rate was 16.4%. A complex statistical evaluation process was used to identify 36 top trends.
In the sectoral relevance survey, 252 prevention experts from the German Social Accident Insurance assessed all 117 trends for their respective sectors, i.e. they estimated the influence of each trend on the occupational safety and health of insured persons in their sector. The survey covered 57 sectors in total. The top trends in this survey were determined numerically. Where a trend had a major influence in at least 30 percent of all sectors, it was considered to be of high relevance across multiple sectors, and thus a top trend. The sectoral relevance survey identified eleven top trends, eight of which had already been identified in the future relevance surveys.
A total of 39 top trends were identified from all surveys. During the project term, trend descriptions were produced for 25 of the 39 top trends and published on the trend portal. In addition to the trend descriptions, which summarize the most important background information in order to present the trend and its impact on occupational safety and health, "effect sketches" were created. The idea for the effect sketches arose in the course of the project, as mind maps on individual top trends, presented in lectures, were found to be particularly helpful as precursors to the effect sketches. The effect sketches visualize the chain of effects from the abstract trend to the concrete outcome (work-related health hazard, illness, accident) at a glance. The trend descriptions and effect sketches complement each other as outcomes. The effect sketches can also be found on the trend portal.
In order to evaluate the Risk Observatory and its outcomes, a survey of the prevention managers of the German Social Accident Insurance Institutions is planned (project number IFA0104) for the spring of 2026, once the current project has been completed.
-cross sectoral-
Type of hazard:-various
Catchwords:risk assessment
Description, key words:Risk Observatory, prevention, risk, emerging risks, trend, German Social Accident Insurance Institutions