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.
Certified occupational health and safety (OHS) management systems have become a global instrument in regulation of the work environment. However, their actual impact on OHS—in particular on softer psychosocial issues in the work environment—has been questioned. The most important standard of OHS management is OHSAS 18001, which has recently been supplemented with a British publically available guideline (PAS 1010) focusing specifically on psychosocial risk management. On the basis of the international literature on management standards, the present paper analyses OHSAS 18001 and PAS 1010 in order to understand the mechanism by which they work. The paper takes a social constructionist approach conceptualizing standards and their expected mechanisms as socially constructed—based on a particular kind of knowledge and logic—although they are presented as objective. Such a constructionist approach also emphasizes how standards transform specific work environment problems into generic procedures that can be audited. In the case of OHS standards, both the work environment in general and the psychosocial risks in particular are transformed into simple monocausal auditable relations whereby the complexity of psychosocial work environment issues seems to disappear. The new PAS 1010 guideline, which is particularly focusing on regulation of the psychosocial work environment, only partly succeeds in solving these shortcomings of OHSAS 18001.
a b s t r a c tPsychosocial risks are closely related to work organization, management and organizational context. Therefore, the nature of psychosocial risks is complex and differs from more traditional OHS risks. The OHSAS 18001 standard explicitly claims to deal with all OHS risks, including psychosocial risks, and the audit is a key element in OHS management systems. However, the literature indicates that audits of psychosocial risk management are difficult and multifaceted, and the available practice excludes psychosocial risks from audits. Based on an analysis of the literature and available methodological approaches, we propose a new conceptual model for audits of psychosocial risk management. The model is grounded in the British ''Guidance on the management of psychosocial risks in the workplace" (BSI, 2011), which has recently been developed to remedy the shortcomings of the OHSAS standard. The model builds on an interpretation of audit evidence that includes an integration of general scientific knowledge regarding psychosocial risks with local contextual knowledge. A key tool for the application of the integration is realistic evaluation, which provides the opportunity to assess the link between psychosocial risk management measures and expected outcomes. Another important tool is the qualitative interview, which is the primary method for data collection. The concept has important implications for the dominant audit practice and auditor competencies. It leads to an expanded knowledge base and a broader concept of audit evidence that further presupposes considerable auditor resources, and changes the required knowledge base and skills of auditors.
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