Don’t ignore ‘wellbeing’ in your OH&S management system

When people think of occupational health and safety, they often think about people wearing physical protection such as hard hats or personal protective equipment (PPE).

But for progressive companies, the management of psychosocial hazards and wellbeing in the workplace is becoming widely recognised as an area vital to employee welfare and business performance.

Wellbeing initiatives should be an important part of the processes that you include in your management system. And many of the requirements of ISO 45001 include areas where wellbeing can play a key part. It is critically important for an organisation to eliminate hazards and minimise OH&S risks by taking effective preventive and protective measures, which include measures to manage psychosocial risks.

Reduce workplace accidents

 The Queens School of Business and the Gallup Organisation found that absenteeism, workplace accidents and errors go up when employees are disengaged. From this, it’s reasonable to assume that through the greater health of employees, these issues would lessen.

Happier and healthier employees are also shown to regularly outperform those who are in organisations which do not promote health and wellbeing.

This is important to note, because for a long time, management believed investing in employee health schemes to be a waste of money, yielding little rewards for the business. With the introduction of ISO/DIS 45003 (en) it is now widely recognised that psychosocial hazards are as important as managing physical hazards.

Psychosocial risk relates to the potential of these types of hazards to cause several types of outcomes on individual health, safety and well-being and on organisational performance and sustainability. It is important that psychosocial risks are managed in a manner consistent with other OH&S risks and are integrated into the organisation’s broader business processes.

Understanding wellbeing

To help companies comply with the psychosocial hazards and wellbeing requirements of ISO45001 we’ve teamed up with T-Cup. T-Cup offer companies a cutting edge ‘self-reflection’ tool that helps improve staff wellbeing in a measurable and sustainable way, empowering organisations and individuals to thrive.

Not only does it help individuals consider their own wellbeing, but it allows companies (through secure anonymised data) to understand employee health, happiness and success, a vital step in workforce engagement.

Companies can therefore measure the wellbeing of their entire workforce and implement strategies to improve the morale of their staff. From company level down to individual teams.

To organise a demonstration of how the T-Cup App could benefit your business and assist with ISO45001 compliance click here or call on 0333 939 87 97 or click the demo link below.