Last month we celebrated our ISO45001 certification. We have yet more good news!
Alison and Jo, our intrepid ISO novices, have been credited in a book. They’ve also been invited to speak at a ‘Women in Quality’ conference. Here they explain what’s happening.
As anyone with ISO certification knows, audits come as part of the package. When we started working on ISO45001 for occupational health and safety at the beginning of last year, the December audit date was our deadline. Our auditor is Jennie Clark and she was booked in for a three and a half day audit visit – argh!
An audit is often treated as something to be feared, but we didn’t find that with Jennie. She has years of experience of auditing in various industries but her approach is pragmatic. As an auditor she can’t guide us on how to do things, but we’ve learnt a lot from the audits and the way in which Jennie makes us consider the standards and their implications for us. Obviously you have to meet the requirements of the standard, but she encourages you to think about the standard as a tool and what it can do for your business, how you can make it work for you to drive things forward. She helped us make sense of it, we just applied it in our own way.
We knew Jennie was planning to write a guide to ISO45001 but we never expected to get a mention in it, nor see some of our work referred to as good practice. It was a tremendous compliment.
Jennie’s book, “Making Sense of ISO 45001:2018” is the second in The Simple Systems Series, (available on Amazon). It’s written in plain English, easy to read and gives practical examples. We’d definitely recommend it to anyone starting on this standard.
Jennie has invited us to take part in a ‘Women in Quality’ conference to share some of our experiences and ideas, and we’re delighted to have been asked. If some of what we did can help someone else on their ISO45001 journey, it’s a good thing.
Jennie said ”I am always keen to see where MK have taken their system in the time since their last audit, and I’ve yet to be disappointed! The way in which the organisation uses the structure of the standards but then builds on top of that shows real intuition, drive and understanding and the team deserve the recognition I gave them in my book. Here’s to the next audit!”