ISO45001 and The Context of the Organisation

Clause 4.1 of the ISO45001:2018 standard, Understanding the organisation and its context, can cause some trepidation, confusion, hand wringing and general bewilderment for people, I know when I first read it I thought WHAT THE!? but then I read it again (and again) and did some research and thought, actually I see what they are doing here, that's pretty helpful, I can see how these 2 lines of text really will benefit any organisation, even if it's not to achieve the ISO certification, so here's my take on it, hopefully it helps. Think of it though as just figuring out your place in the world with respect to your occupational health & safety systems.  

ISO45001 IClause 4.1 Understanding the Organisation & it's Context

What Are the Issues to Consider?

Remember that ISO45001:2018 is about your Occupational Health & Safety Management System so while this isn't an exhaustive list it's a good place to start in terms of where you need to focus:

• External Factors: you need to think about what external factors could impact the occupational health & safety of your organisation (and its products!), consider the requirements of your customers or regulatory bodies, your suppliers and contractors, the environmental and climate conditions people operate in and around, you now need to consider climate change impacts themselves and of course with the every advancing changes in technology you should consider how that can help or hinder your safety approach.
• Internal Factors: you need to think about what internal factors would stop you achieving your OHSMS objectives, it could include anything that would impact your organisations occupational safety approach. You need to think bigger than just about a list of 'critical risks' for instance you need to consider, organisational culture, governance, relationships, key people, knowledge and what impact the loss of these would create. You need to consider the environment you work in, the type of work your people do.

Keep in mind ISO is a team sport and both the Standard and the H&S acts requires you to engage in consultation as part of the process of building your safety systems. The best way to do this is get people in a room and work through these things as a team made up of members from all areas and levels of the organisation.

Tools to Help the Thinking Process

How do you figure all this stuff out and make sure you capture and consider everything you need to?  There are a couple of great tools that you can use to help you work through the thinking and are good when working in a team

SWOT Analysis

The good Old SWAT Analysis option where you will look at your organisations Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats both internally & externally to the business. It is usually helpful to do 1 SWOT for internal factors and 1 SWOT for external factors then you can combine, if you want, but I prefer to keep them separate. It's Ok if similar or the same it items appear on internal & external SWOT analysis documents.

PESTLE Analysis

Another option that we think is one that you shoudl do in conjunction with the SWOT is called PESTLE Analyses and it's a great way of really understanding the external influences on your business. PESTLE is designed to help you look at the key area's that will impact your organisation externally around the following areas

• Political – what impacts does the government of the day have or the next one, what about internal political situations between people and leadership, unions, and members etc.
• Economic – what is the financial situation of the company, how is the economy doing, are your health & safe solutions expensive, cheap?
• Social / Cultural – what is the health & safety culture in your organisation like, is it just starting, is it mature, do you have pockets of greatness? Is the social environment supporting or hindering your goals.
• Technological – can you implement technology to support your health & safety, will your teams adopt it, do you need to keep things simple or are larger more complex options required, do they even exist?
• Legal – What are the regional, national, international laws you need to be following.
• Ecological

Taking these headers or topics you can then think about all the areas within that header that could have an impact on how you run your organisation's occupational health and safety systems and what impacts they could have on it and how you work with those impacts.

This is a great short video explaining what PESTLE Analysis is, it's on the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CPID) website and their YouTube and is one of the best explanations we have seen, you should certainly check out their pages for other great tips.

Other Area's to Consider 

Regular Reviews 

The Standard doesn't stipulate the frequency of reviewing this data, it does say however you must do it, so you need to think about what is right for your business. You can do it as an annual thing you put into your company off site day for instance. However, this annual big bang approach is never truly successful and when you really think about it that's not the intention of the standard either. What it is trying to do is get you to constantly look at your business from a risk point of view, what are the risks and what can I do with them.

Thing change quickly in business, people leave, laws change, technology moves on and your health and safety approach may no longer be correct or nothing could have changed and it's Ok, you just don't know.

It's much wiser to take this in bite size chunks and do it as part of your monthly Occupational Health & Safety Management meeting, that way you are constantly reviewing your organisation, so the risks don't blind side you and the opportunities don't get missed and the trends are spotted, it's documented as part of the minutes of your monthly meeting and best of all you comply with the standard.