Workplace safety is a vital concern for every organization. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.9 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses were reported by private industry employers in 2016, costing employers tens of billions of dollars.

In March of this year, the leading certification standard for occupational health and safety—OHSAS 18001—is changing to ISO/FDIS 45001. Organizations will find much commonality among the two programs as well as a few key differences.

Of particular note, the ISO 45001 standard uses a high level structure (HLS), which makes it consistent with other ISO management systems standards such as ISO 9001 (quality) and ISO 14001 (environment), both of which have undergone updates in the past couple of years. The goal is to base the family of ISO standards on a common functional structure that allows organizations to easily understand and prepare for certification audits across all the standards. Think of it as an operating system for your computer or phone, which allows any number of individual applications to run smoothly without having to reinvent the basic rules for how things work on that device. The HLS does that for the various ISO standards.

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