ISO 45001 is the leading management standard applied within companies to promote the safety and well-being of employees. An interesting aspect of the standard concerns the so-called "interested parties" or "stakeholders," since the standard requires assessing their needs and expectations and deciding what impact they may have on the organization's occupational health and safety management system.
Considering that this terminology may not be familiar to many people, let's try to understand what exactly is meant by this term and how an organization can ensure that this requirement has been understood and respected.
Managing stakeholder expectations is critical to the success of any organization and is probably even more so when we consider that we are talking about health and safety. An "interested party" is defined as any organization, individual, or group of individuals that may be affected by the organization's activities. Therefore, when an organization considers interested parties and refers them to the context in which it operates (this is another requirement of the standard), it has already done a great deal to define the overall scope of the management system.
Let's give some practical examples to better understand which stakeholders we can find in our companies. Let's start with the most common: employees, who are certainly extremely interested in what is done in the organization to protect health and safety. Then we have management and shareholders, who are, of course, vitally linked to all company activities. Moving to the outside, there are suppliers of materials and services, governments and legislative bodies, trade unions, sometimes the people who live near the company, but this mainly depends on the organization's sector of activity. Obviously, the list is not exhaustive because it is impossible to go into all the considerations that each organization must make to determine who should be included in the list of stakeholders.
Once you understand how to identify interested parties, how do you record this information and what do you do with it? The next step is to list the interested parties and try to classify the nature of their interest. Since it will be necessary to periodically review and adjust these categories that are constantly evolving, the information should be stored as documented information. The best way to do this is to consider these elements: the list of stakeholders and the definition of their relevance to the organization and its occupational health and safety management system, the details of each interested party's expectations, how influential it is, and how its expectations might change any activities the organization might undertake for health and safety.
Having done all this, it will be necessary to establish the company's priorities, objectives, and obligations. In this phase, it will be necessary to decide how many stakeholders will enter this list to be kept under constant observation and which ones. To decide, the best thing to do is to evaluate the possible consequences if the expectations of an interested party are not met. Undertaking this process will help you identify, classify, and understand what actions you need to take to ensure that your occupational health and safety activities do not negatively impact stakeholders.
In addition to helping define the scope of your management system, identifying stakeholders and taking the actions they want has another great advantage: ensuring that customer satisfaction is maintained and improved. Although customer satisfaction is one of the main objectives of the standard relating to quality management, ISO 9001, and not - in a specific way - of ISO 45001, meeting stakeholder expectations can easily be done also based on ISO 45001. This element of the standard, in fact, can allow your organization to engage even more closely with stakeholders to create important relationships and advantages that the organization can exploit. The other huge advantage is that including employees among the stakeholders can lead to a renewed focus on people's well-being and better injury prevention. When the results are greater customer satisfaction and greater safety and well-being of employees, then it becomes quite clear what benefits are brought by determining and analyzing the needs of interested parties from a perspective of continuous improvement.
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