Internal audits of psychosocial risks at workplaces with certified OHS management systems

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.