New research finds that companies that took steps to meet an international safety standard further improved their working conditions after adoption, logging 20 percent fewer cases of illness and injury than non-certified firms.
The standard also drew companies that tended to already be safer, according to the working paper Do Management System Standards Indicate Superior Performance? Evidence from the OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Standard. To earn the voluntary certification, workplaces need to demonstrate that their processes adhere to the global best practices of the standard, called OHSAS 18001.
While advocates have claimed for years that OHSAS 18001 adoption would lead to fewer workplace injuries, better brand image, and access to new customers, such claims were based on anecdotal evidence. In fact, little systematic evidence about the standard’s actual outcomes existed, says Harvard Business School Professor Michael Toffel.
“Management system standards require adopters to embrace best-practice processes, and the theory is that these processes will improve performance. Our study provides evidence that this occurs, at least for OHSAS 18001 in the US,” says Toffel, the Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management. He partnered on the research with HBS doctoral student Kala Viswanathan and Duke University professor Matthew Johnson.
Widespread adoption, but does the standard work?
Some 2.8 million workplace injuries and illnesses in the United States cost companies an estimated $171 billion in wage and productivity losses in 2019, according to the National Safety Council.
By 2018, more than 90,000 organizations across 127 countries had adopted OHSAS 18001. The similar ISO 45001 standard that recently replaced it is even more popular, having been adopted by more than 190,000 organizations around the world by 2020.
To understand the impact of OHSAS 18001, the researchers obtained the cooperation of several global certification companies to access that data, and combined that with safety data that the US government collects from thousands of workplaces every year. The endeavor required the team to seek “special sworn status” from the US government to view confidential records of workplace injuries.
Already safe workplaces became even safer
The team concluded that:
Certification signals strength in safety. The certification process drew companies that were already safer. Each additional injury case a workplace suffered diminished the odds that it would seek certification by 21 percent, and each more-severe injury that required days off diminished the odds of certification by 36 percent.
Injuries fell significantly. Becoming certified to the OHSAS 18001 standard led to a 20 percent reduction in overall illness and injury cases in the ensuing six years after adoption, compared with the six years prior, the researchers estimate. Less severe cases—those that required workers to shift to more sedentary duties while recovering—declined even more at 24 percent.
Inside the studies
Researchers accessed detailed injury data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for almost 2.2 million establishments from 1995 to 2016. They also struck data sharing agreements with 10 major international certification entities to identify all establishments in the US that they certified to the OHSAS 18001 standard.
The researchers used automated and manual techniques to match workplaces across these and other datasets. To estimate the effects of certification, they compared the injury records over time of 274 adopters and 274 non-adopters matched to ensure the pairs were as similar as possible.
Key takeaway
Toffel’s research offers evidence that adopting and being independently certified to this international safety standard signals not only that the company takes safety seriously but actually improve conditions.
The research has implications for hundreds of thousands of companies around the world that are certified or considering adopting a safety management standard, Toffel notes.
[Unsplash/Rob Lambert]