Navigating your way through ISO 45001 clauses
ISO 45001 replaced the older OHSAS 18001 standard in March 2021. We’ll be looking at why this newer occupational health and safety standard is so important and how to start navigating your way to compliance. Even if you weren’t accredited to OHSAS 18001 in the first place, ISO 45001 can still be a powerful addition to your management system that is worth considering.
Why you should embrace ISO 45001 compliance
Before we dive into your ISO 45001 compliance journey, it’s worth exploring why it’s so crucial businesses embrace the new ISO 45001 standards.
Firstly, neglecting accreditation or letting your old OHSAS accreditation lapse leaves your business without a formalized and demonstrable approach to guaranteeing the health and safety of your employees. That in turn introduces your business to:
- Risk: Employee accidents aren’t just bad in themselves. Reputational damage, morale dips and potential legal action are all tangible risks which can spring from suboptimal health and safety management.
- Costs: Insurance premium increases, fines, compensation payments and lost time can rapidly stack up with any health and safety incident. Robust health and safety therefore makes financial sense as well as being as a key way to manage your risk environment.
- Business as usual: Not necessarily a bad thing – your organization may not experience significant health and safety risk, and you may be satisfied with how many accidents and near-misses you currently experience each year. But letting your ways of working stagnate and fix could invite problems in the future.
In contrast, ISO 45001 accreditation forces your business to commit to continuous improvement and to an ethical culture of physical and mental wellbeing that detects and stamps out risks as they emerge.
10 benefits of getting accredited
- Build a reputation as a caring, responsible employer, improving your access to new talent.
- Turn health and safety from a tick box compliance exercise into a core component of your company culture supported by everyone.
- Scrutinise your occupational risks and take targeted action.
- Slice your overall operational costs.
- Boost employee morale and efficiency while cutting turnover.
- Minimize bad publicity and reputational damage.
- Make a happy, zero-harm environment a real operational goal.
- Prove your quality: robust health and safety supported by top management usually accompanies strong management of your broader business too.
- Leverage new processes and technology you might otherwise have neglected.
- Pinpoint opportunities for continuous improvement.
The key changes with ISO 45001 requirements
The clauses with the biggest impact moving from OHSAS 18001 to ISO 45001 are the continual improvement, leadership and context of the organization clauses.
Clause 3.37 - Continual improvement
Continuous means without interruption – a constant, persistent and relentless stream. Whereas continual is when the same action or event is repeated frequently, sustained and ongoing.
It’s not feasible for a business to be continuously improving, there must be room for evaluation, reflection and implementation of changes. Continual improvement is for the long term. No organization can get better every second of its existence. The best organizations make improvements in steps and allow time to learn from failure or use success to spur the team on.
Clause 4 – Context of the organization
The organization must understand the internal and external issues that can impact positively or negatively on its health and safety performance. This includes organizational culture and structure, and the external environment including cultural, social, political, legal, financial, technological, economic, market competition and natural factors of significance to its performance.
Internal factors are elements that you have full control over such as policies and objectives and supply chain to name a few. However, looking at external factors that are out with the organization’s control, a common model used to outline and identify these factors is PESTEL (political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal). The factors identified through the PESTEL model can then be analysed through a SWOT analysis to ensure that all strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are fully explored.
It is important for an organization to fully understand the forces that can, and will, inevitability have an impact on them. This could be anything from the weather interfering with a delivery or causing a potential incident onsite, to external political and world events.
By identifying these risks, threats and weaknesses, you can take a proactive approach to mitigating risk.
Clause 5.1 - Leadership
This clause provides guidance on how the organization demonstrates leadership and commitment to taking overall responsibility and accountability for the protection of workers with work-related health and safety. This relates to the occupational, health and safety management system, and how it ensures adequate worker participation in its development, implementation and improvement.
Health and safety professionals are LEADERS - you need to LEAD your senior management and leaders through this clause and beyond. Getting buy-in from the board can sometimes be difficult but getting the message across showing the clear benefits of transitioning is key. Looking at it from a board perspective, I would far rather have full visibility, and this is a clear opportunity to make this happen.
This is a major change that stops leaders delegating responsibility. They must lead by example. Health and safety professionals used to be kept awake at night with overwhelming feelings of responsibility under OSHAS 18001. This should no longer be the case under the new ISO 45001 requirements.
The fact is leaders must play their role! This is a great opportunity for internal engagement, educating, coaching them and working as a team. ISO 45001 is everyone’s standard.
Where to start in gaining ISO 45001 certification
Is it essential to achieve ISO 45001? No. But it will take your business to the next level of occupational health and safety as an employer, supplier and competitor.
ISO 45001:2018’s introduction of Annex SL should make it easier for organizations to integrate their OHS management system with other management system standards (MSS) including ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. The Annex SL framework was developed in 2013 and sets out the same high-level structure (HLS), text and terms and definitions for all new and revised ISO management system standards.
This means that the framework is the same for all ISO standards – the hard work is done!
With a greater emphasis on worker participation, the trick is to lead, drive and ‘own’ the process and at the same time empower everyone to engage with it.
There is also an explicit requirement to link health and safety to your business strategy and proving that is the case.
What can you do next?
With a manual system, you can still navigate your way through the ISO 45001 clauses and get them embedded in your organization, but it is a lot harder. Embracing the latest health and safety management technology will help ease the pressure and build a supporting health and safety culture which underpins and strengthens your compliance. The right quality management system helps organizations to be proactive rather than reactive.
Supporting your ISO 45001 compliance
Find out how Ideagen support organizations to meet the requirements of ISO 45001.
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