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Organisations should understand why ensuring occupational health and safety (OHS) is important for them. The obvious reasons are work-related injuries, accidents, and health problems that their workers can face. Safer workplaces not only help the employees to do their jobs in the best way but also improve the business’s KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). When employees feel safe, they perform better and stay longer in your organisation. Therefore, along with higher productivity, you have better employee retention and lower costs of recruiting and training new employees.

When it is about ensuring the health and safety of your workers, there is no better solution than the ISO 45001 certification! It is the international certification for the OHS management system that helps organisations create a safe and comfortable work environment. It helps you ensure that your workers are safe from accidents, stress, or illnesses while they are at work.

In this blog, we have discussed for you the importance of occupational health and safety and how this ISO standard will help ensure OHS in your organisation.

Importance of Ensuring Occupational Health and Safety

Ensuring the safety and well-being of workers can significantly benefit a business. There are many ways a safe workplace can reward your company. To be specific, it can result in:

• Higher employee retention: When employees feel safer in their work environments, they appreciate the employer and tend to become loyal to the company. Thus, they stay longer.
• Improved productivity: Employees who feel safer also become confident in their respective positions and do their best. As a result, their productivity increases a lot.
• Certain cost savings: It is well known that severe work-related accidents or deaths are subjected to legal scrutiny. They can lead to serious lawsuits and financial losses for the company. Thus, ensuring OHS in your workplace means that you follow appropriate safety practices and guidelines to prevent such mishaps and associated costs.
• Enhanced corporate reputation: Organisations that have managed to keep their employees safe always are recognised as reliable and responsible employers. It gives a big boost to their reputation and company branding. Also, skilled people looking for jobs will be interested to work in such organisations.

5 Keyways ISO 45001 helps in Ensuring Workplace Safety

Organisations that achieved certification to ISO 45001 are successful in ensuring workplace safety by implementing a strong OHSMS. As a proper management system, it enforces the following practices.

Identification of Risks and Hazards

To make enforceable measures for workplace safety, it is most important to identify and acknowledge the possible sources of risks/hazards. The hazards can be related to processes, equipment used, and work conditions. For instance, construction workers face the risk of falling from working at heights. Warehouse workers in a food company are subjected to harsh conditions like cold temperatures and pressures.

Thus, hazards can be related to anything in the workplace. A few common hazards are machine failure, heat or explosion, contact with hazardous substances, and noise and smoke pollution. It is first necessary to know what hazards are most possible in your work procedures so that you can decide on appropriate OHS measures.

Development of an OHS Policy

Once you have discovered the potential safety and health risks, the next crucial practice is formulating an OHS policy. The policy should incorporate the necessary procedures and health-safety guidelines for employees. It should be conveyed to every employee and ensured that they follow them.

Training and Building Communication Plans

Creating an OHS policy is not effective until and unless all the employees follow its underlined procedures and guidelines. As an employer, you should remind them about your policy and help them abide by it.

To make your employees aware of the policy intricacies, hold training sessions on regular basis. During training, educate them about the required safety procedures and deliver interesting ideas on workplace safety. Besides training, build communication plans to consistently communicate with the employees and remind them about health and safety precautions. Such plans help to provide safety handbooks, documents, and important messages on work safety to the employees at the right time.

Engaging Employees through Leadership

Obviously, to have a proper approach toward OHS in your organisation, the involvement of senior managers and their leadership are required.  So, you need to involve the top management team and buy in their support for creating the policy, training, communication plans, and so on.

Senior managers will help to spread the important messages on health and safety to employees through proper communication channels such as meetings, emails, presentations, posters, signage boards, etc. Thus, they will amplify your OHS management practices by using explicit means in an open environment.

Build a Safety-Focused Work Culture

To establish a robust OHS management system, you need to foster a safety-focused work culture where employees are aligned to the OHS goals. They also should help ensure each other’s safety, especially when they are working together in a risky work environment. Thus, a safe work culture means a workplace where employees follow safety practices, remain alert to risks, report hazards, and keep their co-workers safe.

Here again, training, communication and leadership have the key role to play. They will help to encourage your employees and empower them with safety information to foster such a workplace culture.

Final Words

A safe work environment is a prerequisite for employees to deliver their job roles and responsibilities. Thus, companies should never think about overlooking the aspect of OHS management.

Employees need to be assured of health safety and protection while they are working at your organisation. While you may communicate to them everything about your work safety measures, they may not yet be convinced. Achieving the ISO 45001 certification will help you assure this sensible aspect for your employees. It is the international standard for OHS (occupational health and safety) management, known to all. Thus, when your company achieves the certification, they know that you have adopted the above safety practices and promoted workplace safety culture across the organisation.

As an employer, you should also make sure that your organisation has a standardised OHS management system in place. If it is not the case, we at Compliancehelp can help you implement the OHS management system and get it ISO certified. We have been providing consulting services to businesses in their ISO implementation journeys for years. So, feel free to get in touch!