ABSTRACT
The intention of a management system is to define how a given process should be controlled. The occupational safety and health management systems (OSHMS) approach can therefore be helpful for organisations with multinational sites or trading partners. Writing a management system common to find management systems in use that have been written by an organisation's safety professional in isolation, or at best with a few comments from someone else. A common output of process to create an OSHMS is a long document that is issued to all work locations with an instruction to the manager that they are to read it, brief their teams and implement it. A clearly defined, effective OSHMS is a vital component in any organisation's approach to improving its safety performance and culture. But designing them has traditionally been viewed as the safety professional's 'bread and butter', and something done in isolation with little thought of the end result other than a tick in the box.
