ABSTRACT
The standard requires the organization to identify and manage the work environment needed to achieve conformity of product.
The word environment is very topical at the dawn of the 21st century. The protests in the 1980s and 1990s made us all more aware of the damage being done to the natural environment by human activity. The boom and bust years from the 1970s onwards made us aware of the fragile nature of the business environment and the decline of lifetime employment so prevalent in the first half of the 20th century. However, trade union protests in the 1970s and 1980s also made us aware of the environment in which people work and the breakdown in relations between management and workers. With the 1990s came the growth in violence in the home, a sharp rise in single parent families, homelessness and issues within the home environment that spilled over into classrooms and urban areas. These four types of environment are important and although only work environment is addressed directly in ISO 9001, they are all interrelated. They all involve people and it’s the same people that populate the work environment.
