How to Reduce the Time & Costs of ISO 45001 Compliance

ISO 45001 demonstrates to clients and employees that you are able to uphold a high standard of health and safety. But, at the same time, it can be costly and difficult to maintain. Fortunately, Human Focus provides a suite of tools to streamline the process of attaining and maintaining the standard.

One of the biggest challenges of maintaining ISO 45001 is the investment in time and money that it takes. This is due to the numerous aspects of the standard that must be carried out and then demonstrated. This includes things like:

In order to hold the standard, every organisation must determine what level of competence is required to ensure a suitable level of health and safety performance. After determining, what level of competence is required, they must ensure employees have it.

This means all employees must have adequate training, education and experience. Specifically, they need to be able to identify the hazards of their work environment and know how to handle them. It also means having systems in place to ensure competence remains up-to-date.

All of the above must be demonstrable. This means you must be able to provide evidence at any given time that health and safety competency requirements are upheld.

Along with the employees, those in management and upper management roles must have what’s required to lead on health and safety. This means that leaders must take overall responsibility for preventing occupational ill-health and injury and be accountable for health and safety performance.

Effective top-down leadership ensures safe operations are embedded throughout your organisation, including in board meetings as a part of larger organisational goals.

In order to do this, it is essential that those at the top have the training to understand what is required of them and what it means to lead on health and safety.

Leaders must not just ensure health and safety is functioning throughout, they must also ensure that everyone understands them and how they work.

Organisation-wide awareness means ensuring everyone understands things like:

• Occupational health and safety policy and objectives
• How each employer contributes to the health and safety management system
• Benefits of maintaining a high level of health and safety performance
• Feedback on incidents that have occurred and lessons learnt
• Hazards, workplace health and safety risks and what actions have been determined

Health and safety information and policy must not just flow from the top down to frontline workers. Clear channels of communication must be in place to allow for all levels of the organisation to consult on the creation of management systems and provide feedback on how it is functioning. Specifically, they must be able to contribute to the continuous improvement of the organisation.

This may include things like meetings with representatives, reporting systems, and toolbox talks or discussions. Whatever the method it must demonstrable.

In parallel with the requirement for consultation, ISO 45001 states are clear requirements for communication. As a part of your health and safety management system, you must show you have determined:

• What you will communicated
• When it will be communicated
• Who it will be communicated to internally at each level and to external stakeholders

A requirement of ISO 45001 is that documented information is maintained and controlled by the organisation. This means control over documents such as RAMS, SOPS, and health and safety policy and procedure.

Information must be suitable and available to be used, when and where it is needed. And you should have evidence that control:

• Access, retrieval, distribution and use
• Storage and maintaining it in a suitable state
• Versions and amendments
• Disposition and retention
• Documents from external organisations required for your policy
• Ensuring information remains valid/not obsolete

Human Focus offers the largest off-the-shelf library of health and safety online training to help you guarantee staff competence. Our course content covers numerous topics from the risk assessment process to fire safety and specific workplace hazards. All training is recorded and easy to track, ensuring you have evidence of what has been provided.

If you have training requirements specific to your organisation, we have the capacity to develop courses bespoke. Our dedicated team of online training developers will work with you to develop the course that is right for you.

Our collection of manager and upper management training courses will ensure leaders to identify and recognise health and safety risks, understand safety precautions to control those risks, and effectively communicate with staff to implement these procedures.

These course titles include:

• IOSH Managing Safely
• IOSH Managing Safely Refresher
• IOSH SHE for Construction Site Managers
• IOSH Safety for Executives & Directors

Human Focus tools ensure consultation and communication occur as required and are required. For instance, the e-checklist system requires that safety controls are implemented on the shop floor and allow users to raise issues, report back and ensure that this important information is investigated and acted upon as necessary.

Our Content Builder gives you the power to create your own training materials and online training as needed. This means when new risks and hazards arise you can address it immediately. This is bolstered by a safety alert system, which further keeps everyone informed on the spot.

Our competency database maintains all internal and external records all in a single competency database. Training is tracked, recorded, and evidenced all from one portal.  Upload and store existing and new documentation, such as SOPS, RAMS, and anything else that is required. Access can then be granted to anyone, anywhere as it is needed.

Thor Atkinson fabricates structured steel work and operates plant on various sites around the UK. Over the past year, Thor Atkinson have been working with Human Focus to roll out their health and safety compliance and training initiatives. Working in partnership, they were able to achieve levels of success they hadn’t seen before.

Ways that Human Focus helped, include:

Training: Using the Human Focus learning management system (LMS), Thor Atkinson were able to easily assign the right training where it was needed, while maintaining clear records of completion.

Tackling Coronavirus: The Human Focus content builder allowed Thor Atkinson to build their own Covid-19 prevention campaign. Once created, the campaign was shared with all of their colleagues as a health and safety online training course. This allowed them to demonstrate to their customers that they had shared key information and requirements around preventing the spread of the infection.

Addressing change: Thor Atkinson used safety alerts to keep staff informed of important policy changes they received from their clients, which needed to be shared in the company.

Paper trail: Thor Atkinson was able to record and demonstrate training, health and safety initiatives, and control over all documentation related to policy.

According to Jonathan Thorne, Group Safety Health Environment Advisor for Thor Atkinson, they found using Human Focus very easy and efficient. Jonathan says that the support is always on hand whenever there is a problem for anything they have difficulty with.

Thor Atkinson found that the ability to publish their own content online as training was an important part of their culture change initiative. Moreover, they have plans for this year to start uploading content to help with training on specific equipment like workshop machinery.

With the help of Human Focus, Thor Atkinson was able to achieve their first-ever accreditation to ISO 45001 last year. In addition, they applied for their first RoSPA award and were awarded a silver.

According to Jonathan, it would have been very difficult to achieve those without the Human Focus toolkit. So, it has been a vital partnership.

Human Focus can help your own organisation bring its health and safety performance to the next level. The tools we offer are designed to help you improve health and safety training provision and management and create evidence to demonstrate compliance. This will get you on your own path to ISO 45001.

Contact us to find out more!