According to the International Organization for Standardization, every 15 seconds a worker dies from a work-related accident or disease.

Therefore, ISO also recognizes that the adoption of ‘risk-based thinking’ to safety management in the work place, can significantly reduce accident levels and offer organisations the opportunity to be better protected.

Furthermore, with today’s speed of technological innovation and AI, robotics and the use of new materials becoming increasingly commonplace, the very nature of occupational safety and health risk is changing. Supply chains, too, are becoming more sophisticated with their increasingly dispersed nature increasing levels of risk, making OSH both more diverse and more complex with potentially substantial legal, financial and reputational exposures.

In this context, it increasingly pays for organisations to take an integrated approach to managing all their risks. Instead of traditional approaches that pigeon hole different risks into separate categories such as safety, health, insurance, projects and cyber, risk managed approaches take a holistic approach of all the major threats and opportunities to an organisation’s core activities and objectives.

Increasingly time poor boards and senior leaders too, look for such a holistic approach in management of OSH in their organisations. They need to know OSH risk is being managed effectively, but also proportionately to other risks, and they need to ensure risk communication uses the language of the business, not jargon.

Written by Steve Fowler, MIIRSM. 

MANAGING RISK

IIRSM’s one day Managing Risk course, provides a thorough grounding in risk skills for OSH professionals. Run by trainers who understand the challenges facing OSH professionals today, and loaded with practical case studies, it gives a clear and practical grounding in the principles, processes and policies used in risk management. Click here to find out more.