MANAGING WORKPLACE CHANGES IN A COVID AND - HOPEFULLY, SOON(!) - POST-COVID WORLD

​When future history books are written, the pandemic of 2020 may well go down as the time when the way we live and work changed fundamentally.

The workplace of the future could look markedly different from the ones we were using in 2019, from flexible working spaces to plasma ventilation systems, body temperature sensors, desk screens, and the many other things which may become commonplace.

Undoubtedly many things will change because they will have to, in order to remain relevant and useful to our current plight. And ISO standards will be no different.

There are current elements of ISO standards which have already become more prominent and important to the organisations that use them. Hopefully this will also spur others to see the value they can bring in a Covid and (hopefully, and soon) post-Covid world.

Our first example will be ISO 9001, which is the standard that deals with the management of quality systems, and its focus on disaster recovery and business continuity.

With this standard you have to look at your risks and document them, along with the controls you’ll use to minimise any adverse affects this would have. Typical risks have traditionally been identified as extreme weather events affecting property, transport and power supplies (which can also have an impact on global supply chains); cyber-attacks and disruption to IT systems; changes to regulations and the political landscape; an loss of customer confidence due to negative publicity.

The idea is that you’ll manage disruption and limit the effects of these events to ensure business gets back to normal as quickly as possible.

Now, we’ve seen many a Business Continuity Plan that has also listed ‘pandemic’ as a scenario, but one that has probably never been envisaged as coming to pass. However, this is without doubt going to change, and how a business weathers a ‘virus event’ will become a hot topic for discussion across management teams up and down the country for years to come.

Another big area of significance will be attached to ISO 45001 - the standard addressing health & safety - and how assessing the risk of Covid in the workplace will become a primary concern.

In the UK, this falls under general management of health and safety in the workplace regulations, and all employers have to take reasonable steps to protect workers and others from the virus. A Covid-19 risk assessment is seen as a key part of this.

Guidance from the Health and Safety Executive, itself using guidance from Public Health England, drew up a series of issues an employers need to take into account when undertaking this assessment, such as identifying what work activity or situations might cause transmission of the virus; who could be at risk; how likely it was that someone could be exposed; and how they would act to remove the activity or situation, or if this wasn’t possible, control the risk.

In addition, some groups of people could be at more risk of being infected and/or an adverse outcome if infected, and this also need to be considered in the risk assessment.

So having a properly set up health & safety management system with a defined way of carrying out risk assessment using all of the available guidance definitely made life easier for organisations that had the ISO 45001 standard, and will continue to do so.

And finally, a nod to the importance of the ISO 27001 information security standard - organisations that had an information security management system in place found it so much easier to handle setting up staff working from home.

​Organisations with the standard already had a suite of policies for working from home, along with risk assessments already completed, controls in place to combat unauthorised remote access, logging access to networks traced in the event of an incident, along with processes in place to close down any incidents as quickly as possible.

So as we change our ways of working, many elements of the most popular ISO standards are there to make it as easy as possible.

​And the reason? Because they are all ‘risk-based’ standards. This means that they help you to focus your resources toward things that present a higher risk to you and your customers and clients. And these days, that means a lot.

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