The language of workplace wellbeing is imprecise. Terms get used interchangeably when they mean different things, and the imprecision has consequences. An organisation that confuses psychological safety with psychosocial risk will measure the wrong thing and act on the wrong signal.
These are the definitions we work from. They are drawn from our practice in maritime, mining, oil and gas, and other safety-critical industries, and from the frameworks that govern them.
Capacity Index, Organisational Capacity, The Six Drivers of Wellbeing, Psychosocial Risk, ISO 45003, Human and Organisational Performance (HOP), Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), Wellbeing as Operational Intelligence, Six Drivers Diagnostic, The BALANCED Programme, Crew Welfare Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) 2.0
Capacity Index
The Capacity Index is a measurement system that scores the organisational and human capacities determining whether incidents happen at all. It produces a single number a leadership team can act on.
Capacity is the ability of a system to absorb variability and recover from failure. The index measures the presence of that capacity, not just the absence of events that went badly. It is built from two layers. The organisational layer scores six capacities across the business. The human layer applies the Six Drivers diagnostic. Together they produce one score, visible before the event and actionable before the harm.
Unlike Total Recordable Incident Rate, which records injuries that have already occurred, the Capacity Index identifies the conditions under which a serious incident becomes likely.
Organisational capacity
Organisational capacity is the first layer of the Capacity Index. It comprises six capacities scored objectively across the business: Know, Understand, Resource, Monitor, Comply, Verify.
These are drawn from the due diligence duties directors already carry and from resilience science. Each is scored from objective indicators on a scale of 0 to 10, then rolled up across sites and over time. The six capacities stay fixed, because the duty to understand operations and their risks applies everywhere. The indicators that prove each capacity are co-designed with operational teams, so the framework is standard and the evidence belongs to the organisation.
The Six Drivers of Wellbeing
The Six Drivers of Wellbeing are the systemic conditions that determine whether a workforce is operating at capacity or drawing on reserves it does not have. They form the human layer of the Capacity Index.
The framework builds on research by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward, adapted for high-risk industrial environments where the stakes of wellbeing failure are measured in lives and catastrophic events rather than engagement scores.
The six are:
Leadership and Relationships. Trust, inclusion and psychological safety. The emotional infrastructure of work.
Work Design and Demands. Clarity, autonomy and manageable workload. Whether work energises or exhausts.
Flexibility and Balance. Control over when, where and how work happens. The ability to manage recovery within operational constraints.
Recognition and Growth. Appreciation, feedback and development. Whether people feel valued and have a credible path forward.
Purpose and Meaning. The connection between individual work and greater contribution. Especially critical in high-consequence environments.
Culture and Safety. Whether reporting, speaking up and slowing down are genuinely supported. Culture is not what is written on posters. It is what gets rewarded and what gets punished.
The drivers are not separate categories. They are interconnected systems that reinforce or undermine each other. In industrial settings that interaction matters more, not less. Poor leadership does not simply reduce engagement. It can create fatal hesitation in an emergency.
Psychosocial risk
Psychosocial risk is the risk to a worker's health arising from how work is designed, organised and managed, and from the social conditions in which it is done.
It covers workload and work pace, role clarity, supervision quality, job control, interpersonal conflict, and the conditions that determine whether concerns get raised or quietly absorbed. These are conditions of the system, not personal failings.
Psychosocial risk is not the same as psychological safety. Psychological safety is one contributing condition within it, sitting under Leadership and Relationships. Treating the two as interchangeable leads organisations to measure sentiment when they should be measuring design.
ISO 45003
ISO 45003 is the international standard for managing psychosocial risk within an occupational health and safety management system. Published in 2021, it provides the structured framework for identifying, assessing and controlling the psychosocial hazards that arise from how work is organised.
It is guidance rather than a certifiable standard. Its significance is directional. Across major jurisdictions, board-level due diligence on workforce risk is moving from voluntary guidance toward regulatory expectation, and ISO 45003 is the framework that expectation is forming around.
The Six Drivers map directly onto the psychosocial hazards ISO 45003 identifies. That is not coincidence. Both recognise the same conditions, viewed through different lenses.
Human and Organisational Performance (HOP)
Human and Organisational Performance is an operating philosophy which holds that human error is normal, that error is a symptom of conditions within the system rather than a cause of failure, and that the organisation's response to failure matters more than the failure itself.
HOP shifts the question after an incident. Instead of asking what the individual missed, it asks what the system failed to prevent. The practical consequence is that improvement effort moves upstream, toward the conditions that produce error, rather than downstream toward the person who encountered them.
Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR)
Total Recordable Incident Rate is a lagging safety metric that counts recordable injuries per unit of worker hours.
It records harm that has already happened. Analysis across more than 3.2 trillion worker hours found that 96 to 98 percent of the variation in recordable injury rates is statistical noise, with no correlation between recordable injury rates and fatality rates. Texas City followed three years of falling TRIR. Macondo happened while safety metrics sat at record lows.
TRIR is not useless, but it cannot do the job most organisations ask of it. It cannot identify the conditions under which the next major incident becomes likely. Managing safety by TRIR is reading last quarter's newspaper and calling it a forecast.
Wellbeing as operational intelligence
Wellbeing as operational intelligence is the position that workforce wellbeing is a source of operational risk data, not a welfare programme.
Around 80 percent of serious incidents trace to human factors: fatigue, cognitive overload, attention under pressure. Each is a condition of the system. None appear in conventional safety metrics. Measured properly, wellbeing tells an organisation where its system is under strain before that strain becomes an incident.
This is the distinction between a wellness initiative and a leading indicator. One is something an organisation offers its people. The other is something an organisation uses to run its operations.
Six Drivers Diagnostic
The Six Drivers Diagnostic is the instrument that scores an organisation against the Six Drivers of Wellbeing.
It combines survey data, leadership interviews and policy review to produce a systemic picture of how the organisation is affecting its people across all six drivers. Each driver is scored from 0 to 100, with narrative evidence and gap analysis structured for leadership and board reporting. It forms the human layer of the Capacity Index and is independently valuable on its own.
The BALANCED Programme
The BALANCED Programme is Wellbeing Daily's education and capability programme. It is built around eight pillars of individual wellbeing.
The eight pillars are sleep wellbeing, physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, work wellbeing, self-care wellbeing, social wellbeing, life-joy wellbeing, and daily habits.
BALANCED is distinct from the Six Drivers of Wellbeing, and the two should not be confused. The Six Drivers measure the systemic conditions an organisation creates. BALANCED builds individual capability within those conditions. One is a diagnostic. The other is an intervention. An organisation that runs BALANCED without measuring the Six Drivers is teaching people to cope with conditions it has not examined.
The programme is adapted for the operational realities of high-risk industries. For maritime crews, sleep disruption specific to watch-keeping rotations. For mining, the physiological and cognitive realities of FIFO rosters. For oil and gas, circadian disruption specific to offshore rotation cycles. Each version builds practical capability rather than awareness.
Crew Welfare Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) 2.0
The Crew Welfare Self-Assessment Questionnaire 2.0 is a voluntary maritime industry self-assessment tool published by RightShip in partnership with the Sustainable Shipping Initiative.
It is structured around the Code of Conduct on delivering seafarers' rights and covers seven chapters: commitment, fair terms of employment, crewing approach, crew wellbeing, crew protection, addressing seafarer grievances, and implementation. Charterers and cargo owners increasingly request access to a shipowner's completed self-assessment as part of commercial due diligence.
It is not a regulation. It is a voluntary instrument, but its commercial weight is growing, because the counterparties who charter vessels are the ones asking to see it.
Chapter 4 addresses crew wellbeing directly, requiring a physical and mental wellbeing plan, a designated wellbeing officer, a welfare budget, mental health support, and pulse surveys. Chapter 3.5 addresses fatigue. Chapter 6 addresses whether seafarers can raise concerns without retaliation. These map closely onto the Six Drivers, which is why an organisation with a Six Drivers baseline is already most of the way to answering the questionnaire with evidence rather than assertion.
