ISO 45001 – Occupational Health and Safety

By implementing the most up-to-date occupational health and safety standard, your organization will be seen as an elite category of business, and be internationally recognized. It is a level of excellence that is acknowledged worldwide and will help to set you apart from your competitors.

By demonstrating that you are actively facilitating continuous improvement of your employees’ morale, safety and performance, it will enable people to trust you and hold you socially accountable for your staff’s well-being. Being transparent and promoting your corporate social responsibility efforts can have a huge impact on how the public, your future employees and prospective clients perceive your business.

ISO 45001 creates an organization built around best practice. This is then mirrored across the company and sets a standard for managing risks. Having a strong, consistent standard means that the organization is more efficient across the board.

By simply implementing ISO 45001, it provides a platform to attract lower insurance premiums as it proves the organization is performing strong due diligence in managing and protecting their employees.

ISO 45001 has been widely anticipated by the global business community because it addresses the personal health and safety risks to the individual of any process or use of machinery within an organization. This relates both to their mental health and physical safety within your workplace.

This particular ISO ensures responsibility and ownership lies with safety management personnel or top level management. By having the involvement of top leadership and a clearly communicated process for identifying hazards, the occupational health and safety of employees is continually improved over time.

Implementing ISO 45001 helps your organization prevent risks as opposed to reacting to them once they are detected by others. The internal auditing system provides an ‘early warning system’ to help you spot potential threats to health and safety.

There are various ways that ISO 45001 will provide ROI for your organization. By implementing ISO 45001, the efficiency of your staff improves, whilst workplace injury reduces. This means your productivity levels can be improved significantly across the board. This improvement in productivity and general employee safety can have a positive impact on the insurance premiums for your organization. A by-product of this is that work-related insurance claims decrease and further improve the cost of insurance for the business.

The focus is primarily on the employees physical and mental well-being at work as opposed to the quality management of the workplace systems and tools that are used. This is an important factor to recognize when looking to implement ISO 45001 into your organization, as it improves staff morale, which has a significant impact on staff turnover and retention rates.

Fundamentally, it deals with both the risk and opportunities whereas OHSAS 18001 and previous standards primarily deal with the risks presented by an organization.