What lessons can businesses and organizations learn from the pandemic?
If there’s one silver lining to the pandemic, it’s that employee health and workplace safety has received renewed focus as a central tenet of effective business leadership.
But for companies at the start of their health and journey, creating or updating policies can be a confusing task.
COVID-19 has demanded creation of more resilient national Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) systems. The key elements of these types of systems go beyond basic policy and regulatory rules and approaches,” says business improvement and standards company BSI Group.
Indeed, these systems must also include – at the very least – occupational health services such as testing, personal protection, on-site medical services and other means of support, not to mention more robust information exchange such as health and safety impact advisory services and training of employees, managers and even suppliers.
Mostly, says BSI Group, it means providing the proper level of resources behind these systems from the individual organization through state and federal government to better respond and recover from crises for workers, customers, suppliers and those who support them.
Key changes
The necessity of effective health and wellbeing policies can be best demonstrated by the pandemic:
“Using COVID-19 as an example of needed policy and system changes, while many businesses are depending upon vaccinations to return to normalcy, comprehensive health and safety measures will still need to be in place.
“The pandemic has highlighted the need for forward-facing risk management planning that takes into account a wide-range of scenarios. This does not mean creating rigid plans with tremendous details regarding potential future threats, but rather more general principles and processes that can, in turn, be adapted to often unanticipated situations,” says BSI Group.
Currently, safety management systems that require accountability and compliance with core safety issues will be more effective because these allow companies to generate more specific – and flexible – responses as needed.
But where to start?
BSI Group
To learn more about the benefits of investing health and wellbeing in the workplace, BSI has made available a free whitepaper for businesses and organizations.
The paper covers why the emphasis on health in the workplace is so important now and defines what is wellbeing, particularly wellbeing at work. It differentiates between workplace wellbeing versus generalized occupational health and safety. Furthermore, it describes workplace wellbeing program attributes including what is needed to provide measurable results, specifically the top 5 criteria that make up a successful program and how this fits into a “Total Worker Health” model. And finally the paper explains how both occupational health and workplace wellbeing fit into other frameworks such as ISO 45001.
To find out more, download this free whitepaper from BSI Group.
BSI Group is renowned provider of occupational health and safety management systems. Its mission is to share knowledge and innovation to help businesses and organizations incorporate best practices.
