Internal audits of psychosocial risks at workplaces with certified OHS management systems

Abstract

Psychosocial risks are widely recognized as a major challenge at work, a challenge that most organizations find difficult to manage in practice. The OHSAS 18001 standard provides a framework for the management of occupational health and safety risks, including psychosocial risks. However, such occupational health and safety management (OHSM) systems tend to have difficulties in adequately addressing psychosocial risks at work. A crucial element in the OHSM system is internal audits. We have investigated how two Danish municipalities have transformed the general audit guidelines into internal audit practices capable of targeting the psychosocial risks. The results show that the municipalities experienced difficulties in transforming the general audit guidelines into practical models, and we found that this led to significant variations in audit practices. The explanation for these difficulties can be found both in the nature of the psychosocial risks and in implementation constraints. Compared to traditional safety audits, auditing psychosocial risks appears to require different methods and auditor competencies, a factor that the OHSAS 18001 standard does not explicitly take into account. On the basis of our study, we reach two major conclusions: first, that the standard provides little help in auditing the management of psychosocial risks in relation to OHSM systems; and second, that the full potential for management of psychosocial risks cannot be achieved without developing additional methods and auditor competencies for audits of psychosocial risks.

The Wicked Character of Psychosocial Risks: Implications for Regulation

“…In principle, these standards are voluntary, and private and public organizations can obtain OHSM system certificates that are subject to third-party audits. However, such OHSM systems are in some cases integrated into public regulation regimes (Jespersen, Hohnen & Hasle, 2016). Frick & Kempa (2011) have offered some critical evaluations of the risks involved in delegating both regulatory standard setting and regulatory monitoring and enforcement to private actors.…”

“…However, the OHSAS 18001 offers little or no guidance on how to carry out audits of psychosocial risks, and the auditors, like government inspectors, are left with a difficult task at the workplace. As a consequence, management of psychosocial risks is generally not included in audits (Gallagher & Underhill, 2012;Hohnen & Hasle, 2011;Jespersen et al, 2016;Robson et al, 2012). The exclusion of psychosocial risks has been related to the way audits of the management system are carried out (Hasle & Zwetsloot, 2011).…”

“…However, the researchers all point out the difficulties in regulating psychosocial risks compared with physical and safety risks (Hohnen & Hasle, 2011;Lippel & Quinlan, 2011;Starheim & Rasmussen, 2014). The regulatory difficulties appear in both the labor/factory inspection process (Lippel & Quinlan, 2011) and in the OHSM systems auditing process (Hohnen & Hasle, 2011;Jespersen et al, 2016). In this article, we use a broad concept of regulation (inspired by Jordana & Levi-Faur, 2004) by which regulation denotes all societal actions intended to change behavior for the greater good, and we therefore include both labor inspection and OHS management (OHSM) systems audits.…”

Analysis of certified occupational health and safety management systems in Portugal

“…Some papers (Fernández-Muñiz et al, 2012a;Santos et al, 2013) reported and stressed out the benefits collected from OHSMS implementation, the perceptions and attitudes from certified OHSMS companies regarding safety behaviour and its effectiveness (Robson et al, 2007;Chen and Li, 2012). Other papers focused on the assessment of the OHSMS (Abad et al, 2013;Inan et al, 2017), on the performance of the OHSMS (Azadeh et al, 2012.;Desa et al, 2013b;Lo et al, 2014), on the comparison between the OHSAS 18001 and national standards (Abidin and Irniza, 2015), between certified and non-certified companies concerning safety climate (Ghahramani, 2016) and point out and promote linkages between the OHSMS implementation with other constructs or aspects such as sustainability (Marhani et al, 2013;Qi et al, 2013), voluntary safety management (Paas et al, 2015), safety behaviour (Fernández-Muñiz et al, 2012b), participatory ergonomics (Yazdani et al, 2015), psychosocial risks (Jespersen et al, 2016), safety management (Vinodkumar and Bhasi, 2011), organizational learning (Granerud and Rocha, 2011;Silva et al, 2017) and decision making aiming at effectiveness improvement (Mohammadfam et al, 2016). Some recent published papers address the OHSMS in an International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Safety, 1:1 (2017) 11-28 13 integrated context and other dissect some pertinent and relevant IT issues aiming at a successful management of the system of systems.…”

Commitment or Compliance? Institutional Logics of Work Environment Management

“…When organizational actors employ compliance approaches such as the use of certification from international standards, or simply work toward avoiding actions from the regulatory agency, research shows that they will give attention to work environment issues that can be made auditable, that is to say made into 'manageable procedures and auditable performances' (Hohnen & Hasle, 2011) such as checklists and safety KPIs and thus fitting the basic rational understanding of the risk management approach. This will also, in most cases, give priority to aspects such as safety risks and physical exposures that can be measured and registered, over complex and possibly hidden psychosocial work environment issues (Jespersen et al, 2016).…”