Online tool to help businesses achieve and maintain operating levels for new safety standard

The Safety Climate Tool from Health and Safety Laboratories has been identified as the most accessible platform for businesses wanting to achieve the International Health and Safety Management standard ISO 45001.

The standard, which comes into play at the end of the year, will introduce the need for commitment from senior management to proactively demonstrate health and safety leadership, creating an environment of continuous improvement.

In order to prepare for the switch, Acclaim, Supplier Assessment Services’ Health & Safety assessment scheme, has announced a new partnership with the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL), part of Health and Safety Executive (HSE), to utilise its Safety Climate Tool.

An honest insight

The online tool is essentially an anonymous survey, which enables management to gain a better understanding of employees’ and suppliers’ attitudes and perceptions of H&S in key areas of its business. The resulting report will provide the senior management team with an honest and open reflection of the company’s current attitude toward health and safety.

Maintaining standards

As part of meeting the new standard, businesses will also need to provide evidence that can demonstrate progress. This means having a mix a mix of both leading and lagging indicators. Lagging indicators are measures of what has already happened, such as the number of accidents and near misses. Leading indicators measure performance and continuous improvement.

Relying on past performance on its own is often a poor predictor of future results, whereas organisations that pay attention to leading indicators tend to have a stronger safety culture and better safety performance.

The Safety Climate Tool is able to offer you a platform on which to measure these indicators. Not only that, but it also offers benchmarks against HSL’s average and industry specific dataset. The software will also then provide accurate next steps of how to improve identified aspects of weakness.

For those wanting to check out the criteria for ISO 45001 compliance, we’ve compiled a handy checklist that can be found.

The platform is available online now!